What I wish I knew as a Junior (Developer)

A letter to my younger self

Jan 08, 2024

Hello humans!

And a happy new year to you all. As we kick off this year, I am trailing a reflection & goal-setting method for the past year and the year to come. I’ve never taken a structured approach like this before but each year has felt as if it bleeds into the next (especially post-COVID) so I have decided to be more purposeful with setting specific and measurable goals to hold myself accountable.

Reflecting on 2023 led to some reflection on my professional career (as a Software Engineer) which led to reflecting on how much I’ve grown since I was a Junior Software Engineer. As a result, I thought I’d share some of those insights in issue #6 of Waves & Code; in the hopes that it helps anyone starting their career (regardless of whether in tech or any other field).

I look forward to reading this in a few years and seeing how my perspective may have changed.

A Letter to Younger Me - What I wish I knew 📮

During your first year of being a developer, you faced many challenges and experienced many learnings. Listed below are some of those experiences and the learnings that came from them. Listen up padawan, there are some golden nuggets of wisdom in these texts.

Imposter Syndrome

What you felt: When you started as a Junior Software Engineer everything was new. You had pivoted from Astrophysics to Software; started working in a language & framework you had never heard of before (Ruby on Rails); moved to a new city and those were just a few of the changes. You doubted yourself often at the office thinking you were a fraud and that you were not good enough to be there. You had imposter syndrome but you didn’t know, after all, it was never something you had learned or heard about before. This resulted in you picking up small/simple tasks in the dev team due to fear of failure and resulted in you not allowing yourself to grow and learn.

What you will learn: In time you will find that you aren’t alone. You will learn what imposter syndrome is and that those that you look up to on your team also feel the same way (believe it or not). You will find comfort in sprint retrospectives and use them as a mechanism to share with others and reframe negative thoughts. You will find mentors in the tech team and find the confidence to tackle more complex tasks and excel at them. Eventually, imposter syndrome will become an old frenemy - someone who keeps you on your toes but ultimately someone who you greet with a familiar smile.

Ask Questions, you aren’t expected to know everything

What you felt: At nearly every meeting you would hear acronyms, terms, and technologies that you were not familiar with or had never heard of before. This would leave you feeling mildly panicked and thinking, “Should I know this? Do I not know this cause I studied Physics instead of Comp Sci?”. Those feelings would flame the fires of imposter syndrome and send you down Google rabbit holes for hours; attempting to find acronyms/terms that were specific to only your company (unsuccessfully of course). Eventually, this resulted in you feeling on edge and burnt out since you weren’t resting and never getting the understanding you had spent hours trying to find. The truth was that it only really existed as tribal knowledge within the company.

What you will learn: You are not expected to know everything, software development has many complicated domains and you will always be learning as you grow - even as a Senior Engineer. Don’t be afraid to ask questions when you are unsure. This will be the quickest way to learn and grow. You are sabotaging your professional development by remaining silent.
Some terms/concepts can be unique to the company you are employed at. It’s better to ask and get quick feedback rather than coming up empty when researching it in your own time. A great idea is to pay it forward by creating a little “glossary” of terms and abbreviations that you learn along the way - this will be an invaluable reference for a new joiner. Helping others to gain context fast and paying it forward.

Consume Media & Content - Newsletters are your friend

What you felt: You were naive and thought that you were “too junior” to gain meaningful knowledge from technical articles and posts. You imagined most articles to be complex with titles like “Fractal Abstractions: Ruby on Rails' Polyglot Architectural Patterns” which triggered some anxiety and got good ol’ imposter syndrome into overdrive. You thought - “it’s fine, I’ll learn enough by jumping into all available opportunities at work”.

What you will learn: Whilst it is good practice to get involved as much as possible at work (without stretching yourself too thin), it does not expose you to as much as newsletters and other media. Find a developer news feed platform or a few newsletters from people you resonate with (like perhaps Waves & Code - nudge nudge haha) and browse through posts you find interesting. This will expose you to more and accelerate your learning.
Remember, the content you consume to learn from does not need to be purely developer or tech-focused.

Here are some resources to get you started:

daily.dev newsfeed - My personal favorite since it encourages me to read daily by leveling up my ranking for every day I read. You also get a cool dev card that you can link to your Github profile.
Hacker News newsfeed - The OG social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship.
Quincy Larson’s newsletter - Awesome weekly email with 5 interesting links - usually projects you can do. Sign up to freeCodeCamp to start receiving it.
Ali Abdaal’s Sunday Snippets - A productivity Youtuber whose content I enjoy. Not much dev stuff here but lots of awesome nuggets of information.

Work on Personal Projects

What you felt: You always enjoyed learning things from the foundational steps. So learning from tutorials and courses that started with fundamentals seemed like a good way to go. Once finished you would be able to use this in your everyday work right?

What you will learn: This may be true some of the time however you don’t usually have control over the prioritised tasks you will take on. The best way to delve past just surface learnings is by taking on a personal project, this also helps you to learn some system design as well. You will walk into blockers and other problems that will take you past the surface concepts that tutorials teach and into more nuanced concepts. A hot tip is to pick personal projects that impact or improve your life, this way you will always be motivated to work on them.

Your Opinion is Important - know your value!

What you felt: Generally in meetings your imposter syndrome was at an all-time high which made you a great listener who was too afraid to ask questions and contribute opinions to the conversation. Others in the team had been around longer so they would know the system better since their context and domain knowledge was far greater. I should just listen and learn.

What you will learn: Different perspectives in ideation and problem-solving are extremely valuable. Voicing an idea/opinion could either lead to a solution or an explanation as to why that idea may not work. Both these outcomes are wins; the first outcome advances the meeting whilst the other outcome gives you more context and domain knowledge.
Humans also become comfortable with “the way things are done” so your fresh ideas and opinions could also prompt a valuable change in the team/system that had been overlooked due to this thinking from more tenured individuals.

I hope you feel more at ease in your new role. Don’t stress out too much, in a few years you are going to be a confident opinionated developer who has strong opinions and leads projects, not to mention a few conference talks as well.

Adventures: New Year’s Eve Surf 🏄

Somehow a tradition has developed over the last 3 years in which I spend the 31st of December in the ocean surfing my heart out. The weather and conditions have been exceptional every year since this tradition started and this year was no different!

I’ve found it to be a great way to practice some mindfulness at the end of the year and reflect. There’s been a great amount of change in my life this past year and I feel I’m in a more motivated space. It definitely has something to do with the whole aimlessness & anxiety thing from one of my previous posts. This year I’ve also progressed from riding a 7’6 to a 7ft surfboard and getting closer to top & bottom turning. I’ll leave you with this stunning photo from the end-of-year surf.

Favorites this week ⭐

Podcast Episode: How Writing Online Will Make You A Millionaire - Nathan Barry
I’ve been listening to this one on the way to work and it’s been the spark I needed to set up some habits for the year that I would like to form.
Series: Marvel’s What If...?
Short episodes with entertaining alternate stories for well-known and loved characters. It’s an easy watch that does not require a big time commitment.

Thanks for subscribing to Waves & Code in 2023. I’m looking forward to sharing more and continuing to grow our community in 2024.
I sincerely hope this post reaches some juniors out there and helps you in some way.

Please pay it forward and share with anyone starting their career.

Catch you on the next wave! 🤙