DEV Community

Discussion on: Advice for Developers in the Early Stage of their Career

Collapse
 
loki profile image
Loki Le DEV

I've been in coding professionally for ~7years now.
As a beginner I remember that at first I was afraid/shy of modifying code, like every little change I made in the codebase I felt I was gonna break something. Because I thought I didn't understand well enough the code or didn't have an overview of the whole codebase.

So my first advice is, don't be afraid to change some code!
The team should have unit tests and code reviews that will help you feel confident and improve much faster.

Then don't be afraid to read the code also! Be curious, go deep. You're using a library and you feel it's not working as expected, if you have access to the source, go read it. Even when it's working, be curious.
You'll find that nothing is too complex if you take the time to read. Try to get the big picture.

And at least, make it work! Sometimes you are stuck on a tricky bug, something is not working and you don't understand why. This is when you learn the most. Keep going and keep trying. Don't hesitate to ask for help. What matters is that you understand how it was solved.

Sometimes you will have to work on less interesting stuff, it's part of the job, just get it done quickly, don't postpone or try to avoid it. Then you can move on to the exciting stuff. You'll always learn something in the process and be productive.