Practical Advice for Coding Padawans

This is the final post from a three-part series on mentorship, and is for new programmers who are just entering the development industry.

“Truly wonderful the mind of a child is.”

So you recently graduated from a comp-sci program or a dev bootcamp and you’ve managed to secure an internship. Congratulations!

No doubt your internship with be incredibly interesting. Not only will you be exposed to a potentially large codebase, you’ll also learn about agile planning, scrum, deployment, and what happens when users interact with the code you write. The problem is that it’s going to be really hard sometimes, and it all stems from the same problem:

While you are a nice person, you are a drain on the business in the beginning. It is pulling resources from other areas and dedicating them to your development, which comes with high expectations. This means that there will sometimes be discouraging feedback and pressure, and your success will be determined by how you navigate this.

“PATIENCE YOU MUST HAVE my young padawan”

The thing that people want to see most is that you are improving and benefiting from the resources they’ve committed to you. Sometimes that’s easier said than done, because it’s hard to measure your progress and because your boss and mentor come with preconceived ideas of how this manifests. It will take some thought on your part, and there’s more to it than spending 12 hours a day hunched over your desk.

Some good general advice is to be respectful and show a good attitude. Respect your team by showing up on time, even if you can get away with being late. In your free time, take responsibility for developing soft skills that will help you code and work with your team more effectively. Be a mature adult and take time for self-care so you don’t burn out. This isn’t currently something dev culture is very good at, party because of the lack of gender diversity in our field. You need to constantly push to improve but it’s your responsibility to do that at a rate that’s sustainable for you.

“If you end your training now — if you choose the quick and easy path as Vader did — you will become an agent of evil.”

Another important thing is to respect your mentor’s time. They have a lot to deal with if they’re juggling their own dev tasks with helping you out, and often even the quickest question will pull them away from their work at a crucial time. Ask them for an overview of your ticket right after scrum, and then try to go it on your own until you’re really lost. Think about the problem you’ve been assigned and write down the steps to solving it. Before you ask your mentor a question, write it down and see if you can answer any part of it using dev tools or the console.

You can also save time during code reviews by carefully reviewing the files you’ve changed before submitting a pull request. Look for correct indentation, descriptive variable names, and anything else you’ve been chastised for recently.

Another thing you can do is try to be as practical as possible in your questions. As new students we are often eager to demonstrate our passion for learning, but trying to tackle five new js frameworks before you can write a basic promise statement is not clever. Do everyone a favour and focus on getting competent in what you need to be able to contribute to your team’s codebase and get more adventurous after that.

“Happens to every guy sometimes this does”

My last piece of advice is to find the right balance between struggle and satisfaction. Expect things to be hard for a while since you will not be the star contributor of the team, but if the people around you don’t seem receptive to who you are as a person, schedule an interview a week. Coding like a genius shouldn’t be a prerequisite for being shown basic manners.

Here are a few helpful resources when you’re first starting out:

Pragmatic Thinking and Learning, Refactor Your Wetware by Andrew Hunt

The Pragmatic Programmer, From Journeyman to Master by Andrew Hunt

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

This is the third of three StarWars-themed articles on mentorship. Here are the first and second.

All quotes by Grand Master Yoda.