I am interning this summer as a back-end developer in Java. I really want to work for these people at the end of it. It is kind of a there's-no-time-limit-let's-see-where-this-goes thing.
I have been a teacher for the past 5 years. I know that hard work, listening, teamwork, etc. are going to be huge.
Here's my question: What are some tech skills (not specific to any language) that are must-haves for a dev in industry?
Oldest comments (9)
Congrats on the internship! I also did my internship on backend development using Java and I learned a lot.
The leadership skills I focused on a the time includes: ownership, customer obsesseion, and delivering results. Learn more about Amazon's leadership principles here: amazon.jobs/en/principles
In terms of technical skills, writing clean code (using the SOLID principles), testable code, and testing helped me a lot to get a return offer.
I'd also emphasize the importance of writing reusable documentation. By this, I mean an engineer from another team who is trying to do something similar to your project should be able to follow your wiki or documentation as a good starting point.
Good to know. I majored in English, so documentation is already something I care about.
I definitely need to work on testing. Any resources to get better?
Sure! I think knowing one unit testing framework and one mocking framework will meet 80% of what you'll need.
Most of the frameworks share similar ideas so if later you find that your team is using something different, it's very easy to transition to the next framework.
As a side note, the book Effective Java is a gold mine full of Java best practices. There are a lot of book summaries available online, but I ended up buying the book to support the author.
Good luck and wish you all the best!
Git (more than pull, commit & push), CI/DI & testing
Or DevOps to be more general :)
I read "The Phoenix Project" and really became interested in DevOps. I have a lot to learn in that area, though.
I've been writing about some of this stuff in my newsletter. This edition looks at some important considerations and skills when transitioning into a junior dev role, as you are.
Let me know if that helps 👍
Definitely some helpful perspective. The internship is a huge blessing, because of what you mention in the newsletter. I have been working on tons of things by myself and so the scope and size of the codebase I will be working on feels huge. The blessing is that I get some time to intern and learn rather than just be thrown to the wolves right out of the gate!
Thanks for the share!
Programming is one thing, but delivering software is another.
If you can, try to extend your learning and skills to communication, managing work, configuration, release, deployment, monitoring, documentation and infrastructure.
Any kind of commercial organisation that makes money from delivering software will recognise your value.