Five Things a Junior Software Engineer Should Know
Become a better engineer and avoid the common pitfalls of inexperience
When I started my career as a software engineer almost ten years ago, I made a lot of mistakes. Mistakes are great, because you can learn from them. You also make fewer mistakes in the future, so in a way, mistakes are like compound interest — the more of them you make, the more you’ll know in the long run.
I remember landing my first job. I had some experience working on projects of varying size in my own time, both commercially and open source. While some of that experience certainly carried over into my day job, I was presented with a plethora of new challenges and opportunities for learning; even though it may not have always felt that way at the time.
Ten years, a handful of jobs and many notebooks later, I took some time to look back on my first decade as a professional software engineer. Some things went well, others not so much. Out of all those notes, I’ve compiled a list of five things I feel would’ve been valuable to me should I have known them when I started out.
In this article, I’ll elaborate on those things I consider most valuable as a junior software engineer. Though the journey is different for each and every one of us, maybe they could be of some…
