Advice To Junior Developers
Have you heard of Stephanie Hurlburt? She’s a graphics engineer, and an entrepreneur. She’s the co-owner of Binomial, where they make Basis, an image compressor. She is someone who is continually trying to help other developers, particularly women, to improve their careers and skills. She helps others through sharing information, offering advice, providing feedback, or even just retweeting content from her followers.
A few days ago, Stephanie wrote the following tweet
If you are a woman who is a junior coder, or an aspiring junior coder, reply to this tweet with a technical blog post you wrote. I’d love to RT it and get it good visibility.
I will not RT blog posts on soft skills or culture. Only tech.
If you don’t have one, write me one now.
It didn’t take long for the responses to come rolling in. The diversity of the authors and the topics was great. Some of the languages were PHP, C++, JavaScript, Python, and Ruby. Some of the technologies are UNIX sockets, Angular, Node.js, MongoDB, Express.js, Linked Data Notifications, Computer Vision, SSL, Jenkins, and Docker. They’re coming in still, so I can’t list them all. But you get the idea.
The inspiration for this article came from the responses to it. I thought I’d offer some advice for junior developers.
Writing That Article
Should you write a blog post? In a word, yes. If you’re wondering – what should I write about – well, that is a different question.
Writing is a form of communication. If there’s one thing you need to be able to do well, it’s communicate. Writing lets you practice organizing your thoughts. It demands that you sit down and focus on your message, to give it the appropriate attention is deserves.
When you can write well, you can communicate with a wider audience that those you speak with in person. Not only in space, but in time. Your writing can continue to reach people, long after you’ve expressed your thoughts. Any historical volume or document is proof of this fact. The works of great philosophers, poets, mathematicians, scientists, live on and still influence our world today. They dedicated the time, and put in the work – but we only know about it because the took the time to write it down.
Don’t Undercut Yourself
We’re all learning. We’re all trying something different, pushing our limits. Writing your own blog is a good way to record your progress. When you stop trying to learn new things – that’s when you should worry.
One big thing I noticed about the responses to Stephanie’s initial tweet, were the self-deprecating remarks about their articles. I understand why people make self-deprecating statements. It’s a defense mechanism, a way to be “funny”. It’s a way of lower expectations of the person your communicating with. The problem is that, it also lowers their value of you. I used to make self-deprecating remarks all the time. . What I eventually realized was that, I was lowering my self confidence every time I did it. It took a while to break the habit. If you get yourself out of the habit, you’ll be better off.
You can manage their expectations without lowering your value. Instead of saying “This is a very noob article about PHP”, you should say “I wrote this article because wanted to learn about this aspect of PHP”. See the difference? It’s ok to say “I did this” when you put in the work. It’s a statement of fact.
Some Of My Favorite Posts
I went through and read several of the submission the women developers sent, in response to Stephanie’s tweet. I’ve included some of my favorites here with the title, URL to their submission, and the URL of their tweet.
- Terminal for Beginners by Grace Nolan (response tweet)
- CSS Grid for Apple Watch by Meagan Wilson (response tweet)
- Floating Point Number in JavaScript by Sara Fecadu (response tweet)
- The Power of the HTML Form by Joy Clark (response tweet)
- DIY LDN Inbox by Amy Guy (response tweet)
- Variable Hoisting by Miss Ogura (response tweet)
Did you have a favorite article? Did you learn something new? Perhaps you should write a blog post about it