My advice for new developers in 2025

My advice for new developers in 2025

As a tech lead, I am responsible for hiring and supporting developers at all stages of their careers. The best teams (in my opinion) have a mix of senior, mid-level, and junior engineers. While some of this advice applies to all industries, this post assumes that you are in the beginning stages of your career as a web developer and have been hired to learn a complex existing code base to add new and exciting features to. Let's jump in!

  1. Ask questions!

Some of the best developers I've had the pleasure of working with, ask a lot of questions and have a genuine desire to learn every area of the code base. It's important to learn the skill of slowing down your brain and putting your curiosity hat on while learning complicated systems. This is especially important when you are new. You only have the excuse of asking dumb questions for a few short weeks. You might as well take advantage of it! Even if you don't fully understand the idea of something yet, ask about it early on and write down the answers. It will only help validate your knowledge in the future when you start to smell and get hints of how that thing might work.

  1. Pair as much as possible

If you use MS Teams, start a new post in a chat and start streaming as you work. People can come and go, say hi, introduce themselves, and watch you work as you get started. You'd be surprised how much knowledge and insights you can bring when you use this trick. The same goes for Slack or any other messaging app your place of work uses. People might think it's weird at first, but it will slowly start to catch on. Just keep a good attitude and ask a lot of questions while streaming. If you go into an office, the same idea applies. Ask if you can pair up with senior developers and then ask those senior developers what methods they've used over the years for debugging, searching logs, or whatever you're working on or curious about.

  1. Don't complain + Be collaborative

Especially don't complain to co-workers. This might seem obvious, but it's an important note to drive home for developers coming out of blue-collar jobs. I understand in some industries it's practically expected that you complain about the job or about working in general with your other co-workers. This doesn't fly so well when you're trying to learn as much as possible from others in hopes of getting promoted eventually, especially when you're new. Having a good collaborative attitude is important. And the reality is complaining won't change anything. Others will start to avoid your negative attitude, or worse, agree with you and start to pull you down even further into the "this job sucks" attitude which is tough to move on from. If you've had enough, then start looking for other jobs. Just try not to complain and burn bridges in the process. If you need to vent, do it to a friend outside of work, or a family member. Just be sure to thank them or buy them a drink while you do :)

  1. Have trusted resources and make time to consume them

Want to keep up with the latest XYZ programming language? Find a newsletter that emails you updates on it every month. Want to get better at using a framework? Find a decent YouTube channel and subscribe to it so the videos show up in your feed and remind you to keep up on it every so often. I personally can't rely on myself to just bookmark a long blog post and trust that I will come back to it later. So I try to integrate and find sources in the media that I know will consume regardless. Other good places to find easily digestible content are: Reddit, following public projects on GitHub and using the GitHub mobile app, podcasts, and even printed media. If you carve out just 20 minutes a day to do this, you will already be in the top 1% of programmers.

  1. Keep creating

Getting good at something takes repetition. Create lots of repos and go crazy. Code is cheap. Try new frameworks, languages, techniques, etc. One thing I've learned over the years is to slowly expand upon a simple starter project. If you followed a post that walks you through "how to create a blog using next JS" for example, clone that repo once you have it at a good spot and try adding a login/log out feature. Then clone the repo again and add a checkout feature using Stripe, etc. Experiment with new techniques and architectures, and keep expanding and building on top of what you already have. You'd be surprised at just how much you can accomplish over the years.

That's it! Please reach out to me on the 'contact' page if you have any other questions about being or becoming a junior developer. Whether it's job-hunting techniques, or reviewing your resume, I'm always happy to help out those who are just starting out on this wild journey. Thanks for reading!