Absolute truths I unlearned as junior developer
I just started my first job as a junior-mid_level dev last week, my team is really awesome and I&#x27;ve been learning a lot. I&#x27;m the only junior dev on a team with 3 mid to senior devs, so there&#x27;s lots to learn.<p>1: A great quote from one of the most senior developers I look up to town said this: a developer who&#x27;s been developing for 1 year can have _far_ more experience than someone who&#x27;s been doing it for 3 years. I find people who introduce themselves as &quot;developer for 15 years&quot; aren&#x27;t those types, rather it&#x27;s the ones that show innovation.<p>Another quote is this - to become a better developer, you need people at the same level as you, more experienced, and less experienced. So I&#x27;ve taken it upon myself to mentor junior developers in town. Other ways I&#x27;ve learned is by talking about technical challenges from multiple developers in multiple companies in my surrounding region, doing technical &amp; lightning talks, and participating in hackathons.<p>2: I wasn&#x27;t entirely surprised by how little testing there was even at companies that have been around for a 3+ years, I had learn that most companies in my area (even the ones that have great developers) - code test coverage was poor. There is an opportunity cost in testing something that might change later. As kent dodds put it, do some tests coverage on core features, but have integration tests<p>3: I think working with legacy codebases is a great way to learn. The codebase shows a story about how the scope of the project changed, how workarounds were made to meet client expectations in short turn around time, etc. These things you don&#x27;t learn on your own. Being forced to break something down and build it into a better version is rewarding, so long as it&#x27;s not everything you do.<p>4: My first code review was more informal, it was more pointing out everything I didn&#x27;t consider when implementing a feature. E.g deleting old unused code, formatting things semantically and expressively, etc. Was still setting up my dev env so there were a few grammatical errors that didn&#x27;t match eslint styleguides, but we had test runners for those.<p>5: Documentation to me has always been important, but forcing it upon others as a way to bookmark something I avoided. I think it&#x27;s far better to just notate on a piece of paper your interpretation of how the code works, or write your own documents in Confluence&#x2F;team-wikis so your senior dev can understand your interpretation of how things work. As the new dev on my team in a year, documentation was out of date and each dev only knew specific parts of the codebase, so I&#x27;ve been updating how everything works from a eagles-eye perspective. Those notes have a lot of value to the next dev that gets hired, because they come from a clean slate like yourself.<p>I also think, documentating your pseudo-code inside of tickets is important. I&#x27;ve learned the hard way from getting fired at a previous job many years back - you need to actively show your team what you do. Documentation is the lowest hanging fruit, you need to think about what you&#x27;re going to say in your daily standup tomorrow, communication is essential<p>6: For me technical debt is really being able to identify where the debt lies. For instance, rails and laravel has well documented magic, but the path less traveled needs to be understood. My rule of thumb is if I&#x27;m going to write less-than-ideal code, it needs a comment block indicating why I did so. Don&#x27;t push code you yourself don&#x27;t want to read 6 months later<p>7: In regards to seniority, I think the best developers know they are junior in other areas and are multidisciplined in other fields besides programming. I&#x27;ve learned a lot of great wisdom from developers in my city&#x27;s slack channel just by seeing conversations unfold. I know some first year developers whom I already consider senior, and some developers who&#x27;ve been doing this longer who I do not.<p>I think the most important thing I&#x27;ve learned in these 2 weeks in my first dev role, you can be a mediocre dev who just copypastes things and still be a great asset to any team. There&#x27;s a lot of value in just documentation &amp; communication alone<p>Other things I learned - you can bother your senior dev if they just sat-down or stoodup from their desk, or if their headphones are off. But experiment with communicating asynchronously in slack and synchronously in person and see what works and what doesn&#x27;t - even if they sit right next to you.<p>At the crux of everything, it&#x27;s important to have a certain growth mindset. I embrace a japanese methodology called LEAN. Other things - being okay with self-humilation is a great way to learn. Other things - force yourself to take breaks by only using small water bottles or none at all.<p>Also, make sure you say hello to everyone in the morning, my office is 20+ mechanical&#x2F;electrical&#x2F;civil engineers&#x2F;designers, I make sure to say hi to them. I take the longer-route of walking through the frontdoor every morning, my boss makes fun of me for that. Give the gift of giving to others in the community, it reflects well on yourself, my team already had heard of me despite never meeting me b&#x2F;c of how active I am in the local tech community. Rubber duckies are good inexpensive programmer gifts.