No matter how experienced you are as a developer, working on team is (as I've recently discovered) hugely different than working alone. This is an exploration into the transition - with a few tips to prepare yourself.
My Beginnings
I was an off-and-on solo web developer for about 8 years. Starting in high school, I entered the webdev space and slowly built up my skillset. Even though I was doing some freelance work that made me some decent money, I always sort of felt like a lesser developer. I'd look at things like JS Frameworks and read blog posts from well known developers and think this is way beyond me! Well, it was beyond me, but I hadn't yet realized the amazing foundation I'd built for myself.
It was one of Traversy Media's Web Developer Roadmaps that showed me just how close I was to turning web development from a hobby/occasional-income-earner into a profession.
Fast forward about a year and half and now I'm on an amazing team of developers making custom cloud applications for clients - one of the best development gigs in my area.
Your Beginning?
If you are like me - having only worked with yourself on coding projects - it can be really hard to gauge where your skills are. With imposter syndrome ever looming, it's so easy to forget that you are skilled. To gauge where you are, I definitely recommend one of the Web Developer Roadmap videos - Traversy Media's are fantastic but there are lots of good options.
Once you know where you are, you know where you can go and what you can learn to improve. Maybe you're already standing at the top; maybe you just discovered that you were nowhere near as knowledgeable as you thought. You are, at the very least, well on your way to a valuable skill. What you are lacking, however, is experience working on a team.
Solo Vs Team
Getting this experience is not easy without a job. This kind of experience is one of the great things you receive when learning web development at a bootcamp or college. That said, if you are self-taught or come from a path that never allowed you to work on a team, you can definitely prepare yourself.
First and foremost, you need to understand the fundamental differences:
| Solo | Team |
|---|---|
| You work at your speed | You work at the team's speed |
| You (or a linter) are your only code reviewer | Someone will be reviewing your code - and it needs to make sense |
| Git is useful to keep a log of your progress | Git is essential to understand so the team can work on similar things effectively |
Now here are a few things you can do to prepare:
1. Open Source
Taking part in open source projects is the best way to get experience working on a team. Not doing this is my biggest regret. There are a lot of good resources out there detailing how to get started contributing to open source - it mostly seems to boil down to: Start using open source software; find something to improve; improve it.
2. Find a buddy
This one is a little more difficult and requires a slightly higher emotional investment, but the payoff is potentially much higher. Involve yourself in some online communities (like dev.to!) and connect with others that may be in the same boat. Having someone to hold you accountable, read your code, or just bounce ideas off of will be a great start towards team experience.
3. Learn something unique
If you can bring something to a team that no one else has, then you are automatically valuable. Master one technology, even if it's something small, and be passionate about it. Once you're on a team that passion will be infectious and everyone can learn from you.
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