What advice would you give to junior developers?

Break. The. Project. Down.

Seriously though, do it, and learn how to. It's all too often you get a ticket or a project for someone which has 10,000 requirements (Ok a little exaggeration) and it may seem like a huge task up front and can cause excess stress. But breaking it down piece by piece, suddenly things become much simpler and easy to manage.

Albeit not directly developer advice but being able to look at a project and be able to break it down, but hey, being a developer is more than just programming :)

1. Don't be ashamed to ask stupid questions.

2. Everyone makes mistakes, if you don’t make mistakes, it means you doing nothing.

3. If something went wrong, 99,9% a problem exists on your code, but if it’s is 0,01%, and an information about that issue is not exists, it’s normal to write a bug report.

I think it's important to share experience to beginners for trying them for not doing the same mistakes than we did in the past, and to reinforce their knowledge (and so passion) about what they like more (or discovering new things that they like and passions). By the way, giving some advice and practical teaching at job or in posts makes people more secure and so more comfortable using a technology, which increases the motivation for keeping on and becoming better at it.

I usually add advice for beginners / juniors on all my posts for this reasons, you are free to check it out :)

• Ask questions. If you don't understand everything of the answer, that's fine; write it somewhere and look it up. If you still don't understand it, that's fine too. It will come.
• Be patient. There is a lot to learn, and you can't learn everything at once.
• Don't try to learn everything at once. If you have a very partial knowledge of git, that's fine. Same for everything else. You can go deeper later.
• Make your code work, that's the most important. Try to write automated test, that\s the second most important.
• Languages, algorithm and whatnot are not important, for now. You are a problem solver. That's why you need to break down the problem before coding. Not the other way around.
• If you don't get how to break down the problem, that's fine. Analysis paralysis is not good either; begin to code, and see what happens.
• Keep in mind that EVERY principle are no silver bullets. They have their drawbacks; don't use them if you're not sure if you understand them. Same for design patters.
• Everything depends on the context you're in, i.e. the business problem you're trying to solve. Use your brain, more than anything else. Don't follow blindly anybody / anything and keep a sharp critic mind.
• Keep your code simple: no code which is never executed (dead code), don't code functionalities which will maybe come up in the future.

On top of some of the things that have already been mentioned by other folks, I would add this,

• Don't take automation for granted. Always learn/know things running a layer deep.

I have encountered people who just push code to master and do not track/verify whether it actually got deployed to dev. If anything breaks in deployment, they literally don't know what to do next or how to fix it. This not only takes time of other person who now has to troubleshoot, that too only after someone realizes that the code is not getting deployed, but also when you are not tracking, it can create confusion for anyone who is testing that functionality.

As someone who actually just started my very first developer job 3 months ago here are the things that I tell myself when working:

1) Don't be afraid and ashamed to ask questions! Your team is there to help you, and some even appreciate you asking questions because it shows them you're putting an effort with learning the codebase/system

2) Ask your coworker how they would approach a problem or how they would start. This is actually something I do because it gives me insight on how they see it especially with the experience they have under their belt.

1. Ask lots of questions, but also get used to doing research. Your ability to use a search engine and sift through results is one of the things you'll see grow the most early in your career.
2. If you don't feel comfortable challenging the senior devs on your team, there is something unhealthy with the work culture.
3. Simple code is better than clever code. Readability and maintainability is better than performance (unless we're talking orders of magnitude difference).
4. It's okay to throw a project back to your manager/design if the acceptance criteria is unclear.
5. If you're using an open-source language/framework, don't be afraid to jump into the source code. It'll make you better at your base language/platform.
6. If you make a mistake, take ownership but don't beat yourself up excessively. Never take credit for somebody else's work. If you see somebody on your team doing something good, call it out.
7. You'll never know everything, but you'll eventually have enough expertise to completely dismiss some approaches and/or say, "I've kinda done something similar before" to most common tasks in your domain.
8. It's okay not to be 'in love' with software development, but do your best to find yourself doing the things you 'like' about it in a daily capacity.
9. If you can master anything while starting a new language/framework/lib/etc, it should be debugging.
10. Never trust user input.
11. Run your code before you make a pull request.

Hi Silvia - one thought that jumps out at me is this - I recommend that you not explicitly label yourself as 'junior' in your public profiles. So 'Junior front-end developer' --> 'front-end developer'. Here's why dev.to/bhumi/don-t-label-yourself-... hope that makes sense! :)

1) Search for help.
Sometimes you're going to be stuck in a problem. That's ok. It's easy to lose sight when you're looking for so long to a problem. By searching for help you're opening up to learn more quickly and get things done faster. It's almost like taking a shortcut.

2) Ask for feedback and mentorship.
This is what is most important when you're starting, know your blindspots. Ask for code reviews, mentorship this will make you a better developer every single day.

3) Take Ownership of your journey.
You have to own your journey. Own your career. Don't expect people to show up to help you, go for it.

Use a lot of console logs. Google stuff a lot. Read documentation before you start using a library. If you are really stuck, and can't find out how to fix an issue then ask for help on stack overflow, etc. Sometimes you might need to re-word your google search query, but most of the time searching by keywords is enough.