3 Advices will make you the best junior developer everš
I remember myself as a newcomer to the tech ocean when I was a CS Student, studying a lot of courses and having no single idea which way I would take to enter the pro-world.
In the beginning, I fell in love with the development field after coding my first VB.NET application. At that time discovering how to make buttons that perform actions was extremely funny for me and made me want to add more and more, so that i ended up building a calculator app that works which was awesome š.
After that period when the most of the time i lived with VB.NET and visual studio, a web development subject came in a semester and seeing how to create a web page with XHTML, make some interaction with JavaScript and rotate a div with the lord at that time jQuery. All this was a turnover in my entire life. From that time, I decided clearly that I will be a web developer.
But a lot of questions came in my mind;
- There are a lot of new technologies, which one should I pick ? Should I take 2 or 3 to guarantee my first junior position ?
- Tech-stack first vs Fundamentals first ?
- What should I do to improve my skills ?
By experience and especially by making a lot of mistakes, i learnt, still learning and found an answer for this question and in the next section i am sharing with you things that you MUST DO as a new developer in the beginning of your careers.
āLearn from the mistakes of others. You canāt live long enough to make them all yourself.ā Eleanor Roosevelt
Do not waste your time by following the herd and making the same exact mistakes of other developers, including me š½.
Apps/Web/Infrastructure development road-maps are long and the most you optimize your learning process, the more you reach. Learn from veteran mistakes then to rise to the moon.
Bored ? OK letās jump into the important things, here are 3 things that you should avoid in the beginning of your career:
1- Donāt jump into coding directly š§²
I donāt know if everybody does, but I admit that I always felt bored at algorithm or CS fundamental courses when I was at the university. However Algo and Data Structure are the basic tools for the main skills that companies look for in an engineer which is how to use your brain to turn a complex problem into a code based solution using these fundamentals.
Algorithms teach you how to think and by practice it will improve your problem solving skills (even your daily life). So before opening your code editor or IDE and start coding, do algorithm exercises, discover new paradigms, design-patterns which will help you with no doubt in your development career.
I want to highlight that the first step in a job interview after the first presentation call, is the famous technical assessment which will be in most cases, solving a problem. And tech recruiters are waiting to discover your capacity to use your problem solving skills side by side to your programming skills.
Be patient, take your time and invest your time by learning fundamentals even though the boring side of it (writing blocks of algo on a paper š) while you are in the beginning of your career, it will pay off for the rest of your life in term of job position and the salary that you deserve.
2- Learning multiple technologies in different discipline at the same period of time š¤Æ
Letās do an analogy. If you want to learn Spanish and French in order to speak fluently with native-people, could you brain handle that ?
Itās the same thing in our tech world, if you want to master a technology, you should learn itās main programming language first, [practice], be familiar with it and with each and every related tool one by one and progressively. Take your time to test it, build prototypes and why not get a job based on that tech-stack or start a business with it so that you face real-world complex problems. After that and if you have time, you can learn another technology.
Being fun with multiple development disciplines, programming languages or tech-stacks is normal for a tech-guy (aka Geek) but trying to learn all of them compacted in one period wonāt make you a better developer or engineer in it. However, you will have a small idea about each one of them no more.
Being a tech learner is a good thing, knowing multiple things is a quality but Tech ocean needs a specialized divers.
3- Start building small projects with the tech stack that youāve chosen and improve your skills through it. š§°
āPractice make it perfectā
Developers & Engineers are like tennis players, if they donāt train they wonāt improve their capacity to be good players.
As long as you are in the learning curve of your favorite tech stack, you will be facing a lot of problems or reading some difficult concepts that you cannot imagine their exact use cases.
Thatās why, learning and practicing in small projects makes you discover the real world problems and the way to solve them.
Do not rely on a Documentation-only learning process, it will make it boring, easy to forget and difficult to see how and where to implement some advanced concepts and principles.
Letās recap now
- Be patient, learn fundamentals and improve your problem solving skills. After that you will find it easy to pick any programming language to learn.
- Knowing multiple technologies is a very good quality, but mastering one tech-stack is a better choice for your career.
- Facing struggles in your learning curve will make you stronger and stronger, do not rely on reading documentation or watching tutorials. Practice by yourself and Enjoy the process.
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I hope this article will be helpful for you š and if you have any question about career management, orientation or any tech subject feel free to DM me on my Twitter š¦or LinkedIn š!
In case you missed my previous article:
