Congratulations on your journey into becoming a junior developer! It takes a lot of work to get this far, so please take the time to understand how much work you've already accomplished.
If you aren't the emotional type, then you can skip ahead to checking out everything in the 3 buckets. If you would like to stick around, I have some tips and tricks that I've learned throughout the years that have help myself and countless others go from lost and ready to quit to feeling energized.
I believe there are 3 main areas of focus for every soon-to-be-dev to spend their time on. How you allocate that time is entirely up to you, but it it highly advisable that you set targets for each of them in some tangible way. It is very easy to focus on one bucket while ignoring the other 2, which could leave you in a state to either not find work or not pass interviews. I'll give some examples of reasonable goals for each bucket respectively.
Junior jobs right now are largely landed through a referral at the start. If you are cold applying to a linkedin or indeed post alongside 750+ others, it is going to be very difficult to stand out without a referral to get you into that first round. (Check out this bucket)[buckets/bucket-1/networking.md] to understand more about how to create a plan that will help you maximize your time.
All grads need to have projects on their resume if they want to be considered for a junior developer role. Coming up with ideas, hosting, building MVPs, scope, and techstack are all things that you will decide--this bucket will be a guide to help you get started on figuring out how to even start.
This is a much-dreaded bucket, and I can admit that I hid from it for a long time. While going through leetcode examples can be soul-sucking, I have some advice that helped me go from writing sub-par repetitive code to upgrading my syntax and language knowledge, just through using leetcode and hackerrank a bit differently than expected. Don't believe me? Check out Bucket #3 to see for yourself.
Before you learned to code, I could safely bet that in your previous job, you were barely incorrect. If you worked as a server, you probably had no problems taking orders, assisting guests, or working with the kitchen. But when you start coding, by default you will be incorrect 9/10 times before you get it right. You need to get into the mindset of a toddler. When a toddler is learning to speak, they might call an apple, a banana. You would correct them and no one would think anything of it, because that is how you learn. As adults, it is very hard to accept when we are wrong, because we are used to being fairly consistently correct in our daily lives.
Just because you aren't getting the right results doesn't mean you are bad at this. It just means that you need more time and experience. Until you land that first job, you will need to be motivated to do this for yourself. This brings me to my next point:
Like I said before, it is easy to go 100% into one bucket while you let the other 2 dry up. It is also easy to fall into a pattern where you are sitting at your desk for 16 hours a day without no breaks. There is a level of diminishing returns in both of these scenarios, and you need to find where you should draw the line.
Take time to see your loved ones, watch a new movie, or just relax with a non-coding-related book. When I started my bootcamp journey, I worked myself to the bone to try to keep up with the program and ultimately decided to drop out within the first week. I was thankfully encouraged to restart, and my approach the second time around was much, much more humane:
- I meal prepped thoughtfully and had a strict bedtime so that I was well rested and feeling good physically.
- I started going on 2x 5km walks a day and listening to podcasts to clear my brain.
- I accepted when something was beyond my ability and sought help where I could You don't have to do things the way I did, but the takeaway here is that you need to still be a human while you are job hunting. That way you can show up to interviews and opportunities and show how passionate and excited you are about this as a career. Exhausting and frustration show very easily, so it really is to your benefit to take care of your life-size tamagotchi (aka you).
Noting motivates more than a win! When you are taking on something as big as learning how to code, it is easy to feel like you aren't progressing, when really you have come a long way. Here are some things that I have done to stay motivated:
- Track new learnings on a notepad on your desk (not for review, just so you can look at it after a week and see how much you learned)
- Look bad on old work and see how bad it is (we all do this)
- Refactor old work once you understand better patterns and practices
- Try explaining your work to someone how doesn't understand code at all (this will really make you feel like a genius)