5 Things I Wish I Knew When I Was a Junior Dev

Not all that long ago I was a Junior Developer, It can be hard as a junior dev to the “unspoken” rules and tricks of being a successful dev and growing your career;

Learning

Researching and learning new things is in the end down to yourself. This is how you grow outside just what you are working on and give you a larger repertoire of tools and skills you can use to solve a problem. You don’t need to be an expert in the latest thing that comes out, but maybe give it a look and see what’s new and interesting.

Clean Code

Just because your code works does not indicate that the code is good. Write your code so that it can be read and so that is as performant as is sensible. Take on the constructive criticism, even if its seems like something super nitpicky. If someone is suggesting it, it’s because they are acting in the best interest of the codebase or yourself.

Independence

Being able to work on your own is a must, It is certainly okay to ask your colleagues for help, but make sure to exhaust your avenues of debugging before asking your co-worker a question every 5 minutes. So always make sure to exhaust your methods of debugging (search the internet for solutions to your issue, have you tried debugging it, turning it off and on? Etc..)

Peer Review

Ask for feedback on your work and listen to what people have to say, regardless of their seniority. The amount that could be learnt from your more junior colleagues is more than you would think too! Also look at the code of your seniors, you may have no feedback for them, but you might learn something new from the code they wrote.

Ego

Having an inflated ego will cause you far more career harm than any of your inexperience or mistakes. There is no expectation for you to be the best dev on the team yet, so don’t act like you are. Don’t lie about your mistakes because “you wouldn’t make a stupid mistake like that”. Don’t try to flex some niche knowledge you have over your co-workers, you just sound like an ass.

I hope that some of you will find this helpful, and if you enjoyed this, I may follow up with a few more things I have learned to help myself grow and succeed as a dev.