When it comes to starting a career as a developer, people usually think about choosing specific backgrounds like backend, frontend, UI/UX, DevOps, etc.
Once they choose and bootstrap the journey, one important thing they miss.
Thinking out of box
What is thinking out of the box anyway? Is that useful!? Is it some sort of rocket science!? And what gives any developer ability to think out of the box?
Let's break down this problem and try to find some solutions.
Problem 1
Developers stick to copy paste or seeking seniors help and that is the biggest mistake. Usually copying code from GitHub, StackOverflow without thinking is a bad idea!.
Solution
No doubt, every developer does copy/paste but try to be a thinker out of that. Ask yourself a question, why this code? why is it working? what could be an alternative to this code? Is it an optimized/optimal solution?
These questions will help individuals dive deep into the sea and discover an infinite amount of thoughts/fish.
Eventually, they reach a certain stage where solutions will automatically pop-out from their own mind!! It will also help find solutions from StackOverflow/GitHub in one go without writing each & every code from the answer.
Problem 2
Swimming into limited boundaries only.
Beginners usually perform tasks which they are asked for without doing extra. They expect to receive even a tiny amount of detail about the task, just like a spoon-feeding.
Solution
Explore!! Plenty of similar products/projects are already available, register yourself in such website/software and see which features they are providing, what we can adopt from that, what extra we can do to stand-out.
Go to your managers/leaders with a suggestion to improve feature usability or a way to improve user experience.
Problem 3
Being in a blind spot.
Solution
Do not just sit in one chair or work with limited projects. Contribute to open-source, even without being recognized. Create a social presence, stand-out!!!
Step 1: Stackoverflow
Writing answers in StackOverflow will help you
- Discover the solutions to a problem that you never faced.
- Perform tasks you never did.
- Being confident by earning badges.
Step 2: Github
Writing code in open-source repositories will help you
- Understand coding standards.
- Being a detective, looking for problems in others' code is the key to writing better code.
- Find different coding patterns & usage of them.
Step 3: Dev.to/Medium
Reading & writing articles in developer forums will help you
- Understand market trends & standards.
- Inspire to do more than just write code!
- Discover ideas.
- Explore new technologies.
And that's it, now its not rocket science anymore!
Above problems & defined solutions will create your brain a big processor, a deep thinker, an explorer, a leader, and many more.
Top comments (2)
I used to contribute to Stack Overflow but when you post there you will find that many of the moderators are quite hostile and territorial. Haven't contributed there in a while. I find this community to be way more friendly.
I contribute as well, once you earn few badges it will help you ignore such cases and be consistent.