Some adaptive practices for Junior developer

Thanh Trinh
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

Every senior developer have been a junior one and been struggle to change themselves from school to working environment. The growing up is painful and has no easy path to move up during our career.

However, we can grow up more quickly by learning from other’s experiments. We can be avoid from some mistake and concentrate on the right parts.

Disclaimer: There’re no clear definition about Senior or Junior developer. The word “Junior” I used in this story indicate to engineer who just starting their IT job or to some experimented but still lost in their way.

Choose your mentor

Like the school time, you also need working teachers. They will teach you about technical knowledge and working behavior too.

Good mentor will help you go faster — Credit: http://africanleadership.co.uk

Be hungry

Lets prepare some questions before starting your working day. Lets ask about project you have jointed, not only its overall architecture but its business approach also. As a developer, you have to understand system architecture, software source code, of cause is that. However, by aware business requirement and system use-cases you will know why the system be designed on that way but not another.

Remember that when you’re a fresher, you have only one simple but more powerful advantage. Asking. You can ask everything when you’re twenty but when you’re thirty, you can’t.

Four levels of “know”

If someone ask you if you know a technology or not, when you say yes or no?

IT technology have been extremely developing. There’re so many languages and frameworks was born day by day. You may hear about some, even read about others, but could you say you know it? In my opinion, you only say yes if you reach four levels of “know”. These levels is inherited from Chinese Confucianism: heard, read, understood and practiced.

Practice will actually bring theory to you — Credit: http://listdose.co

Be simply, when you hear the attractive framework, React Native — for example, let read about its documents, understand its functionality and architecture, and finally build your own application using it.

Read other’s document, other’s source code

This is another view of learning other’s mistake.

At the time you starting work on the already running project, there’re so many thing you have to read — the BRD, HLD or some detail solution design and elegant project source codes (of course there’re). That seems boring job but you can re-think and change your mind to more interesting tasks. Beside of deeply understanding the project you will work in, you should think “If I had been him, would I have done like this? Yes, It was excellent solution OR No, I would have found other ways”. Let think you’re writing/coding rather than just reading.

Github is the biggest source code resource — Credit: https://thenextweb.com

“World is flat” — so Internet provide us many exciting resources to we learn from. You can find engineer blog and source code repositories of famous companies and try to work on them. This’s so very useful.

And finally, never give up

This seems so boring quote but I decided to write here. You do not build a job, but let see this story image, you’re building your career.


Some useful resources for developers:

Thanh Trinh

Written by

A developer who like something new in technology and programming.

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