Everyone tells you to attend all the meetups, but sometimes that's difficult and intimidating when you're new and don't know a lot of the people at the meetups. Befriend other junior devs around town, and you'll find meetups become more enjoyable. (Bonus: You're building a strong network with future senior devs!)
Keep healthy.
Get sun, move around, laugh freely (even laughing meditation does wonders). You've got a long life ahead of you, so please care for yourself.
Work on a long-running project.
Toy apps are tempting, and you should indulge a bit. But make sure to set aside some time for a larger project, or just a project that takes longer to finish. You'll find such projects work different "muscles", and they'll contain opportunities for learning that smaller projects won't. Maybe partner up with a friend or recent meetup acquaintance.
Make yourself known in your organization for delivering quality stuff, on-time, that's easy to sustain in production. Be the kind of guy that when someone comes to a dev manager in a crisis and says, "Andrew's available...can he help you out?" They immediately think, "THANK GOD!"
By the same token, never sacrifice your reputation for a single "win". Your rep is not worth a single account, single production deploy, or single code commit. Don't climb over somebody else's back to win. Give credit to others. Cover for them. Be someone who earns their trust, genuinely.
It's not what you know. It's who knows what you know.
Follow-on to the above. Put yourself out there enough so that whoever "they" are, "they" have confidence in you. I once had a developer I was mentoring that I pushed forward for promotion, and my director said simply, "I don't know this person. That's a problem." For a technical person, that's irrational, but I've found it to be true.
Set firm boundaries for yourself
I'm a person who didn't have boundaries. I worked too much on things that eventually ended up in the bargain bin of Office Depot. For what? It's a miracle I still have a family.
Do better. Cultivate saying "No" and setting expectations in a way that's professional.
I interned at NASA, working on statistical modeling and machine learning projects. Now I'm at Ferguson Enterprise, working on applying UX principles to internal tooling!
Posse up.
Everyone tells you to attend all the meetups, but sometimes that's difficult and intimidating when you're new and don't know a lot of the people at the meetups. Befriend other junior devs around town, and you'll find meetups become more enjoyable. (Bonus: You're building a strong network with future senior devs!)
Keep healthy.
Get sun, move around, laugh freely (even laughing meditation does wonders). You've got a long life ahead of you, so please care for yourself.
Work on a long-running project.
Toy apps are tempting, and you should indulge a bit. But make sure to set aside some time for a larger project, or just a project that takes longer to finish. You'll find such projects work different "muscles", and they'll contain opportunities for learning that smaller projects won't. Maybe partner up with a friend or recent meetup acquaintance.
BIG + 1 to Work on a long-running project this is exactly what pushed me to start dev.to and stay motivated to grow it.
Bravo, @Sumeet!
You are your Reputation. Act Accordingly.
Make yourself known in your organization for delivering quality stuff, on-time, that's easy to sustain in production. Be the kind of guy that when someone comes to a dev manager in a crisis and says, "Andrew's available...can he help you out?" They immediately think, "THANK GOD!"
By the same token, never sacrifice your reputation for a single "win". Your rep is not worth a single account, single production deploy, or single code commit. Don't climb over somebody else's back to win. Give credit to others. Cover for them. Be someone who earns their trust, genuinely.
It's not what you know. It's who knows what you know.
Follow-on to the above. Put yourself out there enough so that whoever "they" are, "they" have confidence in you. I once had a developer I was mentoring that I pushed forward for promotion, and my director said simply, "I don't know this person. That's a problem." For a technical person, that's irrational, but I've found it to be true.
Set firm boundaries for yourself
I'm a person who didn't have boundaries. I worked too much on things that eventually ended up in the bargain bin of Office Depot. For what? It's a miracle I still have a family.
Do better. Cultivate saying "No" and setting expectations in a way that's professional.
Amen on it's not what you know but who you know!