The first steps in the profession are known to be the hardest. These 9 tips will help those who decided to become a developer and are just starting their journey. And some of these tips will be useful not only in work but also in life.
Learn More About the Business Field
Understand how everything works in your company. In some small businesses, everything is simple, and you will see everything as clear as in the process when you play real money online slots. In bigger corporations, everything is more challenging. A high-quality developer will be interested in the business processes and how the product works. Understanding the purpose of the business will help focus on important tasks and realize their values. When a developer’s contribution to the business is clear and visible, it motivates him as an expert and thus he brings even more value.
Don’t Get Bogged Down in Tests
Tests are an integral part of the workflow. From the very beginning of your career, you need to develop the ability to write quality tests. They are what make the code reliable. You will be more valuable as a developer if your code has a minimum number of bugs in the output.
Start a Pet Project
That’s a great opportunity to try out new technologies that interest you. Here are some of the benefits a pet project offers:
- You can explore and “feel” the latest features of the technology you are working with – this is not always possible in work projects.
- A pet project gives you a chance to learn how to properly use resources, prioritize, evaluate the time spent on a task, and evaluate the work you have done. The advantage is that in work projects, it will help to distribute and evaluate tasks more competently.
- If you have a project posted on GitHub, it’ll add more credit to your future job search karma. If you add a project to your resume, it will be easier for a potential employer to see examples of code you’ve written.
Ask for Help
Everyone has been in your shoes once, so they understand how difficult it is to be a beginner in the profession. Don’t be afraid to ask for help! Wise up your questions before you ask them – sometimes in the process of constructing the question you can find the answer yourself. Don’t despair if that doesn’t happen, either way, the right question can save you a lot of time. Sometimes a developer thinks about solving a minor problem, and later it turns out that the problem is actually much broader. You have to solve it on another level – that way you find answers not only to the right question, but to dozens of others.
Find a Mentor
An experienced mentor can help you find the right direction. He will suggest a solution to your problems and can assess your skills from the outside.
Gather a Knowledge Base
It will be a useful habit to keep all the materials that help you.
This can be anything: links to articles, documentation, code examples or commands in the terminal. Having found a solution to a small problem, you can forget it soon, though you will surely face such problems more than once. It’s always handy to have links and code samples available at your fingertips. This will save time which you would spend repeatedly on searching for the necessary information.
Don’t Neglect Documentation
Usually if a developer has a small problem or difficulty with a simple method they go to Google and look for a ready solution. But they can often be solved with the built-in features of the language or frameworks / libraries used. Take the RTFM principle and always refer to the official documentation first – it will be relevant and will not only cover the possibilities of the language/framework/library, but will also contain examples of solving common problems.
Become an Expert in a Narrow Area
Find a narrow topic that interests you, try to understand it and learn all the specifics.
As you gain experience in one small area, you will also learn something new about related topics. Once you understand one topic and navigate it easily, you can help other developers by answering their questions about that topic.
Choose new topics and immerse yourself in their study. That way you can easily become an expert in the entire field.
Rest
If you want to be productive, you need to rest well. Getting quality sleep will do much more good than working without a day off. You can easily save a few extra hours of work on a task if you rest properly beforehand.
