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6 Tips To Advance Yourself as a Junior Developer
To grow, you need to embrace discomfort sometimes
Working in software is hard — no matter what level you are at. But as a junior developer who is maybe fresh out of school or has just switched to the industry, this journey can be extra challenging.
Comparing myself to a year ago, I have definitely come a long way as a junior developer, from a fresh university graduate to a developer who can input on design decisions and make a real impact on various projects. I think that is a big accomplishment for my first year since entering the field.
But improvement doesn’t come for free. In the past year, I purposefully put myself in uncomfortable situations to get better — and it paid off. In this article, I want to share six tips that really sped up my improvement as a software developer.
1. Have a Personal PR Checklist
As you start to actually work with your team, reviewing others’ PRs is guaranteed to happen.
It’s important to efficiently and correctly review a PR. The implementer can make mistakes, and as the reviewer, you are the last line of defense before potential bugs get merged.
However, carefully reviewing a PR takes time. Therefore, you want to find a balance between the time spent and the quality of your review.
Creating a PR checklist can be really helpful in these situations. You can make a list of things that you need to pay close attention to and keep them in mind when reviewing code.
For example, when I’m reviewing a frontend PR, I pull down the branch and check the following:
- Does the code compile/run locally? Does it have console errors?
- Does the code change satisfy the exit criteria of the task? Does it match with the mock?
- UI edge cases (truncation on long text, Redux race condition, loading/failure screens)
- Mobile responsiveness
- Can UI strings be translated?
- No missing tests
Then, I will move on to more subjective things:
- Coding style. More importantly, does it match the…
