開源日報 每天推薦一個 GitHub 優質開源項目和一篇精選英文科技或編程文章原文,堅持閱讀《開源日報》,保持每日學習的好習慣。
今日推薦開源項目:《快速Web Goxygen》
今日推薦英文原文:《How You Can Stand Out as a Junior Developer》

今日推薦開源項目:《快速Web Goxygen》傳送門:GitHub鏈接
推薦理由:Goxygen 旨在快速地建立一個新項目以節省時間,「能在幾秒鐘內使用Go 、 Angular 、 React 、 Vue 或者 MongoDB 生成一個 Web 項目」。
今日推薦英文原文:《How You Can Stand Out as a Junior Developer》 作者:Daan
原文鏈接:https://medium.com/better-programming/how-you-can-stand-out-as-a-junior-developer-441bdab697af
推薦理由:給初級開發人員的幾個建議

How You Can Stand Out as a Junior Developer

Advice on how you can become a better developer, today

(Photo by Rupert Britton on Unsplash)
Life as a junior developer isn』t always a bed of roses. Software development is hard. The technology improves quickly and things change at a rapid pace. The knowledge that you have today can be outdated tomorrow.

As a junior developer, this can be quite overwhelming. And since you lack experience, it gets even harder.

You』re at a point in your early career where you want to grow as a developer. Since there is so much left to learn for you, you want to know about the things that can make you stand out as a junior developer.

This article is a piece of advice to all junior developers that want to grow as a developer and need a little push in the right direction. We』ll be going over a list of things that you could focus on that will make you stand out as a junior developer.

Source Control

To more experienced developers, source control is just a basic skill. However, most junior developers struggle with source control — at least to some degree. Some of them struggle with what source control does and why it』s useful.

If you really want to stand out as a junior developer, you should focus on a little bit more than just pulling, committing, and pushing. These are the bare essentials that every developer is supposed to know.

But what makes you stand out as a junior is knowing how to stash files, cherry-pick, fix merge conflicts, and know the basic flow of how to create hotfixes and releases.

Make sure that you also understand the theory behind each of these features. Know what each feature does and when you should use it. Once you know how to do these things you』ll be ahead of the curve.

It』s perfectly fine to work with a GUI tool, like Sourcetree. In fact, I』d highly recommend it when you』re new to source control.

A GUI tool abstracts the most common operations behind a few clicks. It』s faster, easier, more reliable, and gives you way more insight into what』s actually happening behind the scenes.

If you want to do source control like a real pro you could start clamping in commands via the terminal. However, it』s not something that I would recommend for beginners.

Just get familiar with source control and all of its possibilities. Learning the commands is much easier once you have a better understanding of what source control is and how it works.

Coding

Since you』re a developer, you』re hopefully going to be coding most of your time. It』s the most exciting part of your job. However, writing code as a junior developer can be quite a challenge.

One of the most common mistakes that junior developers make is writing fancy code. You can recognize the junior developer by quirky one-liners and making simple things overly complex. All this does is make your code become more verbose than it needs to be — which leads to an increased risk of bugs.

If you want to stand out as a junior developer you should try to write code that』s straightforward. But the thing with writing straightforward code is that it』s hard. And it』s something that most junior developers don』t do.

This is the point where you can really shine compared to other junior developers. Writing simple code requires thoughtfulness. It requires several rounds of refactoring until the code is just right. You should try to stick with the KISS principle: Keep it simple, stupid.

What』s also important for junior developers is to go through the whole development cycle at least once. This way, you know what a software project involves. Working from zero to a fully-functioning product will give you so many new insights.

You』ll probably make tons of mistakes along the way, but making those simple mistakes is where you will learn the most. Try to go through a whole development cycle as soon as you can.

Another valuable skill for any developer is knowing what questions to ask once you』re stuck. You』ll eventually run into a problem that you don』t know how to solve.

Most junior developers need to be provided with the necessary resources or a big push in the right direction once they』re stuck. Knowing what questions to ask and how to follow up these questions with the right actions is what will make you truly stand out.

Contributing to Your Team

I』m flabbergasted by the number of junior developers that I』ve seen trying to impress their teammates by taking on the most complex user story of the sprint.

There』s really no need to impress your teammates. They』d rather have you actually contributing something to the team. Because most of the time, when a junior developer takes on the complex user stories, it ends up in a disaster where another developer has to basically babysit the junior developer throughout the entire process.

I admire the courage but don』t overestimate yourself. No one wants to babysit you since everybody』s got work to do. If you really want to contribute something to the team you should take on the easiest tasks first.

These can be the user stories with the least amount of points. Or you could do some small bug fixes that just take a few lines of code. This way, you can get a better understanding of the code base and actually contribute to the team.

Most more experienced developers like to do the more complex stuff since there』s more of a challenge in it — which is great for you because it leaves the 「easy」 stuff open for you.

Learn, Learn and Learn

It』s a fact that a junior developer has less knowledge than the average developer. It』s important to keep learning so you can close the knowledge gap that is required to get to the next level. Try to consume as much information as you can.

Read every merge request thoroughly even though you』re probably not the one approving it. There』s valuable information in it for you. By looking at every merge request, you get insight into how other developers solve certain problems and the thought process behind it.

If you』ve got the chance to pair program with one of your teammates you should take that chance with both hands.

You should be the developer that』s in the driver』s seat and let yourself be coached by your teammate. Make sure to code out loud, so your teammate gets to know your thought process and give feedback accordingly.

And last but not least, you』ve got to spend time behind the keyboard in order to become a master of your tech stack. Practice makes perfect. You need to do a lot of programming, make mistakes and fix them. This is the only way that you』re going to get better.

And if you really want to go the extra mile as a junior developer, you could try to get familiar with best practices and learn about architecture, performance, security, etc.

「Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.」 — Brian Tracy


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