First Month as a Junior Developer

It has officially been (almost) a month since I started my job as a junior developer. It has been eventful. Working in a team, attending a conference, and being assigned to work on a project for a real client. Exciting times!

Working within a Team

Outside of the one group assignment in university where there was only two people (me included) in a group of seven that meaningfully contributed to a project, I have never worked in a team before. All the other projects I have developed are all done by me. Solo. It was never by choice - it’s not like I am against working in a team (though the 2nd year assignment nearly radicalised me), I just never had the opportunity to work in one.

And it has been nothing but great. All of my colleagues are cooperative and hungry, everyone wanted to keep moving forward and learn. It is inspiring to be amongst like-minded people. Surprisingly there has been no major disagreements in the team yet, we’ll have to wait and see.

I learnt about working in Agile. From planning the sprint, daily stand-ups, using a project management tool (we use Linear), and post-sprint evaluation. Though we don’t have a scrum master or product manager, I think I am starting to understand, in a small scale, the flow of delivering a project.

Merge conflicts are the bane of my existence. I hate it so much. I think I know how to solve them, but I’m not sure if it’s the correct way to do it. Meh, I’ll get better at it.

Client Project

I was surprised when I was called to be one of the two developers to work on the first client project. The feeling of ecstasy was almost immediately overshadowed by a looming sense of inadequacy. What if I fail to deliver? I barely know how to deploy a website! Luckily, I have a great mentor that I know will not let whatever we develop go off the rails. He also broke down all the requirements of the project into reachable goals for us junior developers. My absolute GOAT.

As of writing, we just finished doing a wireframe prototype of the project, and presented to our client. The feedback was good. Next step was to actually start developing the web app! Since it’s going to be in Svelte, I have spent the past week trying to learn Svelte and SvelteKit. It has been quite challenging and interesting. I have very little experience with it, but it feels more lightweight and granular than Next.js. It feels like I’m touching the DOM directly; feels very transparent and less black-boxy. Not sure why, need to experience Svelte more to be able to put it into words. It literally might just be placebo because Big React == Bad.

Conference

Not going to get into it, find it here. Spoiler: it was frikkin awesome.

What’s Next

As of today, we were told to start working from home due to the Sunderland riot that happened a few days ago. I am just going to keep doing what I’m doing, looking to improve day by day. My current goal is to be as good with SvelteKit as I was with Next.js in the next couple of months. I simply want to diversify and master my craft.

The WFH policy was just a precaution; a precaution I truly appreciate. What happened throughout the UK was disgusting. The misinformation used to incite violence is utterly vile. If I’m scared of going out in the streets of Sunderland, I can only imagine the people who were targeted must feel. Alas, I can only be responsible and stay safe while the government and police deals with the situation. I urge everyone to keep safe and look out for each other.