Hello there!
Who are you?
I've been working as a developer for around 1 year professionally, i'm currently studying CS and always loved the idea of making things work as i wantby writing code. My current stack at work is mostly JS (Angular 2+, Node), and have worked with C# (.Net).
As a young developer being in the industry since so early, i've been really curious about how we developers define ourselves by 'Ranks', when do you become a senior developer? how do you do it? what you should do/know?, I still don't have answers to those questions, but i realized there's a key factor that influences every developer carreer, no matter how much time and experience they have...
Mentality
When I was just starting, i had to fight with the overwhelming ammount of things that seemed necessary to learn in order to call myself even a developer, let alone working as one. This takes us to the first point:
Don't be afraid of what you don't know
Nobody knows everything, and this is specially true in programming. No matter how many years of experience or how many languages a developer claims to know, what really matters is how do he/she approaches learning new things. And this is an attitude that will open you a huge ammount of opportunities. Don't be afraid of spending hours on a problem that might seem the simplest of them all, just because you don't know how does x thing work, as long as they are spent researching and actively working on understanding it. In the end, you might have learned more than what you were first looking for. It's also important to have in mind that ...
Things may take time
As every other discipline, being proficient as a developer will take time, understanding some things will take time, and making things work will take time, but you should always loow forward to complete what you're doing, because stress and fatigue may come, but will always pays off in the long run. You will be a better developer, and may be able to complete any similar task in a better faster and cleaner way sometime in the future.
Ask what needs to be asked!
And I can't stress this enough. Asking other developers when you're new into programming is one of the best and most enriching things you can do, because most of the time people will be eager to help you and you may learn a whole lot of things in a way it's really hard to reproduce any other way. Most experienced developers also make questions all the time. Not knowing something doesn't make you less of a developer.
What else would you add to this list? when did you stopped feeling as a junior?Leave it in the comments!
Pablo Marcano
Full Stack developer Working @ Kaizen Softworks in Montevideo, Uruguay
Top comments (2)
From the point of view of assessing other people (rather than yourself), I tend to use the term 'senior' for any developer that you can hand a problem to and be certain that it will be taken care of, i.e. I no longer have to worry about it.
Do note that 'taken care of' doesn't mean that that developer should inherently be able to solve it all on their own, but rather that they will grasp what needs to be done, and take steps to get it done, including looking up information on the web, acquiring information from other people, trying things out to see what works, keeping tabs on the requirements versus the available time and effort, and getting hands-on assistance from other people if need be.
Quality of the code, how you make decisions, communication and leadership skills are the difference between a junior and senior developer