This is a guest blog post from Don Abrams, lightly edited. Enjoy.
Dear new developer,
When starting out, the hard part is balancing two things:
- Asking questions
- Banging your head against the wall
Additionally, as a new developer you’ll likely be encountering something for the first time: a codebase that is really really large. Like large enough no one knows all of it. You’ll want to learn how to navigate the codebase ASAP. Every place is different. If you can checkout all the code and get the product running in less than a day, you’re at a world-class shop. If it’s more than a week, I’m sorry.
After you learn to navigate the code, my recommendation is then to learn and copy the patterns that other team members use. So your questions should mostly be “how did someone solve this before?” or “hey, have you seen anything like this before?” If you look at the code they referenced and still have questions, then bring it back up ASAP.
If someone offers to pair, DO IT! Tip on pairing as a junior: be the keyboard and basically have them tell you what to do. You’ll learn how they think about the codebase and learn to navigate it better. You’ll feel stupid when they tell you “just” to do something, but those are the things you need to know. (“just XXX” signals that XXX is complex thing that you’ll take for granted soon– documenting those will really help the next junior).
I also recommend reading a LOT of code.Then, as you get a better command of the codebase and team patterns (3-6 months), you can start asking questions like “why did someone solve this before this way?”
That’s when it gets fun.
Sincerely,
Don Abrams
Don Abrams has over 10 years of software development experience and recently moved to France.
Letters To A New Developer 