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Sophia Brandt
Sophia Brandt

Posted on • Originally published at rockyourcode.com on

Notes on “Ramping Up at Your First Developer Job”

The talk WebOfficeHours - Ramping Up at Your First Developer Job by Mark Noonan is a 1-hour video with useful info for junior developers.

Here are my condensed notes:

First Week on the Job

  • tedious computer setup using skills you never need in any other situation
  • take notes for the next person

Imposter Syndrome

  • remember they hired you on purpose

Communication

  • you might get trained on some of the stuff you'll need to do in your job
  • BUT: people have no idea what other people have told you or not yet, so they might assume that you know XYZ, when nobody told you about it

Social Circle

  • figure out what everybody does and where you fit
  • smaller vs bigger team: in bigger teams there are more layers
  • in quickly moving teams: it's still not expected that you magically produce work, but you might have to stand up for yourself

Learning a New Codebase

  • take a look at the most recent commits/work

Git (Version Control) && Jira (Ticketing System)

  • the culture of how Git is used is often different (and might not be documented)
  • make sure to ask how to approach version control
  • workflows are always different: ask

Be a Little Cynical

  • make sure that others see your effort
  • don't get stuck even on the things you were hired to do

Asking for Help Is a Superpower

Managing Frustration Is Your Job

  • working as a developer is often hard
  • learn how to be patient

Debugging

  • learn how to debug (inspector, dev tools, break points)

Make a Lot of Notes

  • ask a lot of questions

Don't Be Too Shy in Meetings

  • it's ok to mostly hang back in meetings, but say at least one thing if you can

Carving Out "Your Job"

  • try to find the things you're good at

You Can Do Anything if You Have Enough Time

  • your motivation for asking for help is not that you can't get it to work — it's that it's not worth your time to spend too much time on learning all the stuff
  • you will often need to work on something that you haven't worked on before

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Kirk Shillingford

Excellent report!