[Summary] A List of Things I Screwed Up as a Junior Developer in My First Year
I joined the company last year, and I've really been through the wringer since then. I'm writing this down in case it helps someone.
1. I was afraid of code reviews
For the first three months, I was so scared of getting review comments that I couldn't even split my PRs into small chunks. But reviewers aren't as scary as you'd think, and not submitting PRs was actually the bigger loss.
2. I didn't read logs
Whenever I hit an error, I always started by searching for it. Later I learned that just looking at the first line of the stack trace gives you half the answer.
3. I kept putting off writing tests
'Let's just get it working first and add tests later' almost never happens. They just never get added.
4. I couldn't admit what I didn't know
This was my biggest mistake. I was stuck on something for three hours, then asked the senior next to me and it was solved in five minutes.
5. I made my side projects too big
I spent all my time planning and ended up ruining two of them. Now I only build projects with three features.
After a year, I feel like I learned more about how not to get blocked than about actual skills.
3 answers
#4 really hits home... When you've been stuck on something for three hours and the senior next to you solves it in five minutes, the sheer emptiness lol. But asking questions also takes finesse. If you just go, "Why isn't this working?" they'll tell you, but if you organize what you've tried and where you're stuck before asking, you get answers faster and bother people less later. I got into the habit of writing down the blocker in three lines in a notepad before asking, and that one thing changed my reputation a bit during my first year.
Not reading logs is a really big deal, seriously. I also used to have a habit of searching first, but after I got into the habit of reading stack traces, my debugging time was cut in half.
Well, isn't "just looking at the first line of a stack trace gives you half the answer" a bit of an exaggeration? When frameworks or ORMs are involved, the first line is almost always noise, and the real cause is usually in the "Caused by" ten lines below. Generalizing something that varies by exception type and situation into one line could actually be harmful advice for a newbie. I completely agree that you should build the habit of reading logs, but I think the phrase "first line" should be dropped.