The best way to kick ass as a junior developer

Well done getting your first developer job! Now, what should you do to be amazing? I could give you lots of hand-wavy advice on “meet targets”, “fulfill expectations”, “be a good communicator” but that is all useless. So here is the number one best way to stand out as a junior and make a name for yourself.

Solve lots of problems.

Not just solve them, find them and fix them.

You will find yourself speaking to lots of non-technical people in the business and all of them will have their own little bugbears about something in the app or the system that bothers them or doesn’t work. It could be tiny things like a list being ordered by date ascending rather than date descending, or a typo on one obscure button that they see a lot.

Write them all down, create a backlog item in your ticketing system and ask your manager if you can pull it into the next sprint as professional development work. Don’t tell the user you are working on it, just fix it, ship it and then let them know that it’s fixed.

Do this a few times and people will think you are a superstar because you are one!

If you don’t have any access to users then speak to your developer team and fix the little things that they hate but don’t have time to work on.

My favorite on that I did was reversing a list for someone, she had to scroll through years of deliveries multiple times per day so she could select the one she had just added. This wasn’t all that time-consuming but it was very annoying, I was able to fix this in about 10 minutes when I got back to my desk after meeting her for the first time and 3 days later it was released.

She was delighted.