I’ve been working as a developer for around 1 year, I’m currently studying CS and always loved the idea of making things work as I want by writing code. My current stack at work is mostly JS (Angular 2+, Node), and have worked with C# (.NET).
As a young developer being in the industry since so early, I’ve been really curious about how we developers define ourselves by ‘Ranks’.
When do you become a senior developer? How do you do it? What should you do/know? I still don’t have answers to those questions, but I realized there’s a key factor that influences every developer career, no matter how much time and experience they have…
Overcoming the Junior Mentality
When I was just starting, I had to fight with the overwhelming amount of things that seemed necessary to learn in order to call myself even a developer, let alone working as one. This takes us to the first point:
Don’t be afraid of what you don’t know
Nobody knows everything, and this is specially true in programming. No matter how many years of experience or how many languages a developer claims to know, what really matters is how he/she approaches learning new things. This is an attitude that will open you a huge amount of opportunities.
Don’t be afraid of spending hours on a problem that might seem the simplest of them all, just because you don’t know how does X thing work, as long as they are spent researching and actively working on understanding it. In the end, you might have learned more than what you were first looking for.
It’s also important to have in mind that …
Things might take time
As every other discipline, being proficient as a developer will take time, understanding some things will take time, and making things work will take time, but you should always look forward to complete what you’re doing, because stress and fatigue may come, but will always pay off in the long run.
You will be a better developer, and may be able to complete any similar task in a better faster and cleaner way sometime in the future.
Don’t be afraid to ask
And I can’t stress this enough. Asking other developers when you’re new into programming is one of the best and most enriching things you can do, because most of the time people will be eager to help you and you may learn a whole lot of things in a way it’s really hard to reproduce any other way.
Most experienced developers also make questions all the time. Not knowing something doesn’t make you less of a developer.
What else would you add to this list? When did you stopped feeling as a junior? Leave it in the comments!
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