5 Advices / Tips for Junior Developers
Being a junior developer new to the whole IT industry can be overwhelming and intimidating at the same time . Everything is new, confusing or strange and it takes time to settle down which usually is a couple of months (it took me more than that). And this period is when we mess up the most, and is when you should be extra careful. I’ll give you some tips how to not mess up (really bad) and some things you should know that probably no one will tell you.
Ownership and Responsibility
As a developer where you will mess up the most is in the code you write. When you are asked to do an assignment or add a feature, we in a bid to complete the task, turn to google or peers for help and complete the thing as quickly as possible. We are delighted when the half self-written, half copy-pasted code works and we quickly raise a pull request. But our hard work might be mercilessly shot down by the more experienced developers in the team during the pull request review. When I was starting out as a junior dev, I didn’t know there was this thing called as a pull request and pull request review. I had to learn it the hard way. Pull Request review is when you learn about the first and most important thing to know as a dev, that you should know exactly what each line of code you write does. If someone asks you why did you do it this way or what does this function do, you can’t say ’ because it just works ’ . You should be (and are) responsible for each line of code you write. So you must exactly know the purpose of each line of code you have written. And in the PR you must make sure that there’s not even a single piece of code that you did not intend to have. This has to be followed religiously as developer, junior or senior. And on a side note, PR is great way to learn how to write quality code if you have some good seniors devs in the team.
Code Quality
Your aim as a dev is not just to complete the task you are given. You must complete the task for sure, but there’s more to it. Along with the final output of the work, you must ensure that your code is efficient, scalable and extendable. That is, it should perform well in terms of speed, it should work with large sets of data, and also should be easily extended with new features if required later. Your code should not be the bottle neck in the application. Foreseeing all this during development is a skill acquired through experience, but as a junior dev, senior devs and google will be able to help you regarding this.
Learning
As a person starting out in this very welcoming industry it’s good to be humble and drop the know-it-all attitude. Learning is a life long process, and as developer you will know it couldn’t be more true. Each day you are learning something new. Curiosity and the urge to learn will help you make the transition from a good developer to a rock star developer. Learn from your co-workers, learn from google, learn from any possible way you can. Be like the sponge that sucks up all the water. Learning and practicing can you take places and open doors you never knew existed.
Tools
Work smart not hard. Coding can be a breeze if you have the right tools. In the beginning you will probably imitate you co-workers in how they work, which IDE they use, which extension they use. It’s perfectly fine, but you must do your own research as well. There are tons of ways to automate stuff, make debugging and developing easy and also make it more appealing ( ahm.. black themed IDEs ahm…). Finding and using these tools are the most fun and rewarding things as a dev.
Work Life Balance
It’s easy to get sucked into the work you are doing and not bother about the time you spent at work. Staying late night in office to complete might give you the impression that you are hard working, but not to the company. The company might see this as an incompetency as you take more time than it actually should to do something. Try and finish your work and leave at a certain time everyday, that way the company wont expect you to stay late and also you will have a routine. And you also must have a life outside of work. All work and no play makes you boring and uninteresting. Go on a trip on weekends, learn a language or an instrument, or at least watch a TV show, but you should at least have something going on in your personal life.