21 Quick Two-liner Tips for Junior Developers
Know your worth.
Being a junior developer is difficult.
As a junior developer, you need to work on both your skills and marketing yourself. When you ask any senior developer for advice. Almost all give the most obvious ones.
These tips mainly include
Have a Github profile
Make a LinkedIn profile
Properly comment your code
Contributing to open source
Have a good resume.
Yes, these things have been necessary for years. But now if you want to stand out from the crowd. You need to do things a little differently. Simply having a star profile on LinkedIn and a good resume may not help you on your journey as a software developer.
Your future as a junior developer is defined by the work you put into learning more and building great projects.
Here Are 21 Tips to Make Your Life Easier as a Junior Developer
As a developer, if you can communicate better, you can easily explain why you want to go for a different solution.
In any company participate in what is happening. You must show them that you are interested in building the product. You’re not there just for the paycheck.
Developers have less free time and less energy. Still, I’ll ask you to go to some meetings. Your network is your net worth.
Junior developers need a good portfolio website. It will help you get a job easily and build your confidence. You can easily display your work.
Say no to memorize anything. Google and the Stack Overflow website will always be there to help you.
The technology stack you are using right now may not exist in five years. You need to learn how to learn new things quickly.
Practice will make you perfect. To grow in your career as a programmer, you must keep repeating and iterating on what you have learned.
A basic level of design knowledge is necessary even if you are a backend developer. It will help you work efficiently.
For your first job, try to find a company that is the right fit for you.
Finding a company where you are the right fit is more important than the money they offer you on your first job.
It doesn’t matter from which language you start learning to code. As long as you are ready to learn another. You are good to go.
You’re too old to be in tech, that’s shitty advice. Never follow the advice given by those kinds of people. You can start coding at the age of 10 or 45.
Creating content of any type, whether it be audio, video or text, will help you grow in the long term. With content, you can separate yourself from the crowd.
You don’t always look at the front door to enter into a company. There will always be a secret door to get to the interview stage for various companies. Taking a referral works great and here your network can help.
Software engineering is an industry where experience matters. Things will start to get easy as you get more experience.
Use the different developer podcasts to learn more. You are going for a walk in the next half an hour. Find an amazing podcast that you can listen to.
Use Twitter and stay active on it. Twitter can open many doors for you as a developer. You can talk to different people using the same tech stack as you.
Tutorial projects won’t give you a job. Recruiters see hundreds of resumes in a day. They know when you have copied the project. Build your own projects.
Learn to read the documentation. When you know how to read the documentation correctly, your confidence will increase considerably.
The Readme file in your GitHub repository can make your life as a developer easier. You don’t always need to describe your project to others if you have a well-written readme.
Patience is a key skill of a programmer. If you want to pursue a career as a developer, for a long time you will only need patience.
Summary
I am giving you these tips from my personal experience. Two years back I wished someone has given me this advice. It would have saved me a lot of time as a developer.
“There is no magic wand that can resolve our problems. The solution rests with our work and discipline. ” – Jose Eduardo dos Santos