Forem: Dragos Nedelcu

To Every Developer Close To Burnout, Read This

Dragos Nedelcu — Sun, 14 Apr 2024 11:56:23 +0000

Are you feeling exhausted? Overwhelmed and unmotivated?

With no willingness to code, work, or even wake up? Feeling like you lost your passion for the craft?

Then you might be close to burnout.

Burnout is extremely common among software developers.

Some statistics claim that up to 80% of programmers feel burned out. With the developer job market getting more competitive these days, I can only imagine that number going up.

And the worst part?

Burnout will not only damage your career but also your health and personal life.

Getting burned out can even lead you to quit being a developer. And it will put you at risk of dozens of life-threatening diseases, from depression to diabetes.

While the software industry is constantly losing great programmers because of burnout, almost no one seems to care about it. Instead, most articles on software development are only making the problem worse by adding more frameworks and libraries to your learning list.

Software Developers in 2024 be like: "Nah, I am not burned out". Image Credits: theSeniorDev

Today, I will share a Senior Developer’s perspective on burnout and six things you can do right now if you feel burned out as a developer to get your career and life back on track.

But, to fix developer burnout, we must understand why it is happening in the first place.

Why Developers Burn Out

In my experience, software developers get burned out because of many reasons.

First of all, software development is a very stressful job. There is so much to learn and so little time. Anxiety and fear of missing out make you feel like no matter how hard you work to stay ahead, it will never manage to catch up.

This constant state of fatigue can stress the hell out of you.

Second, a lot of software teams are “toxic”.

Ask any Senior Developer and they will tell you the same, the people you work with can kill your motivation and damage your mental health.

Nasty colleagues attacking your work, managers who don’t care about your needs, or an overly competitive culture will drag you down quickly. Combine this with extra working hours, and it will be a miracle if you stay sane.

A burned-out Senior Dev can damage a lot more than code. They can make the Junior Devs burn out faster as well.

Finally, some developers burn out because they feel lost, demotivated, and stuck with no clear path for the future.

The solution here is simple: Be intentional about what you want to achieve in your developer career. Set goals and quantify them. Add a deadline, write it down, and make a plan to achieve it.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some have too high expectations. If you have the wrong expectations, no matter how well you are doing, you won’t be happy.

I burned out more than once during my developer career, and the consequences for my life were always negative. I ended up in the doctor’s office. I hated writing code and everything related to it.

I found myself bitter all the time, doubting my choice of becoming a software developer and thinking of what other things I could do for a living. Here is my burnout story.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

My Burn Out Story

A few years ago, I worked as a front-end developer for a small startup in Berlin, Germany, building software for the crafts industry.

Deadlines were tight as the craft industry gets together at yearly events. We were also dealing with a massive pile of technical debt and only had two other junior developers on the team.

Initially, spending an evening with the team pushing features felt exciting. We were all doing our best and going the extra mile.

Yet, late evenings in the office became the norm.

To make things worse, after working too late, our first stop was a fast food restaurant, and after that, the bar.

There, we would drown our anxiety in alcohol. The next day, I would wake up messed up, sipping coffee and trying to catch up. Only to repeat the same cycle later that evening.

Working long hours also caused frequent conflicts in the team.

Everyone was constantly pissed off. Management believed a few team events and a bunch of beers together would help. When, in fact, they only made things worse.

In only three months, I gained 15 kilos of extra body weight.

Totally burned out after another 12 hours of coding. I took this image as a memory just before my breaking point.

This affected not only my self-esteem but also my metabolism. No matter how many Red Bull cans I drank in the morning, I still felt exhausted. I lacked the energy to get things done, and I was nervous and anxious all the time.

One Friday morning, I remember not wanting to wake up to get to work.

I just didn’t want to get out of bed, work, or talk to my friends. I wanted nothing, just to lay in there for hours. I was afraid to call in sick because I knew my boss would get angry.

But I had no choice. So, I called in sick for the day.

I got some rest during the weekend and went back on Monday. Yet, the same happened. I seemed to be drained by everything. I didn’t pay attention in meetings and code reviews. I was constantly waiting for the day to be over so I could go home.

Next Friday, the same thing happened.

But this time, it was much worse.

A huge skin rash appeared on my left hand, and I started to have nausea. I rushed to the doctor’s office. They told me it was just stress and I needed to take it easier. I was only 25 then, but trust me, my body felt a lot older.

That’s when I finally decided to pause and rethink the whole thing.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

How To Get Back On Track If You Feel Burned Out

After my short trip to the doctor, I promised myself I would not let that happen again. I started reading more about what causes developers to burn out and fixing what was happening. And I implemented what I’ve read.

In about three short weeks, I was back at my usual pace. My burnout was just a distant memory. Of course, the problems in my company were still there. Deadlines were still unrealistic, requirements were fuzzy, and working hours were crazy long.

But I was smarter. This time, I knew how to deal with it.

These days, whenever I feel like I lack energy and motivation or that I am close to burning out, I take a series of steps to prevent it from happening.

1. Force Yourself To Stop

It says "force" in the title because, as stupid as it sounds, many burned-out developers can’t stop working no matter how bad they feel. They are addicted to work.

I remember the doctor telling me that I had to stop working. At the same time, I was asking him how soon I could get back to work—not because I wanted to go back, but because I had no choice.

My boss would soon find a replacement, and that promotion I’d been working so hard for would be gone—just because I was sick. Sad, but true. It happens all the time.

Yet, my mother kept insisting as she was worried about my health, so I decided to take a break.

Stop coding for a bit and take a break. Don’t worry; your computer will still be there when you return.

That weekend, I didn’t even touch my laptop. No coding for me. Not a single line. Instead, I visited a friend in Munich. We enjoyed some tasty German food and the spring sunshine.

Here comes my first piece of advice: force yourself to take a break.

Forget the billionaires that sleep in the office. You are not them. I am not them. I don’t want to be like them. Sure, you are a software engineer, but first, you are a human.

It might not make you look younger, but stopping from coding occasionally will give your body and mind a much-needed break.

Humans have not been designed to work 80-hour weeks all year round, and they haven’t even been designed to do so sitting in front of a computer.

Close your laptop. Go for a walk. Take a nap. Go out in nature. Catch up with some friends. Work less hours. Pick up a new hobby that doesn’t involve coding.

It might sound counter intuitive because you have a lot to do. But that is when you need time for yourself the most.

Trust me, everything will be here when you decide to come back to work. The earth will keep on spinning, and you will realize that no matter what "tech influencers" say, technology doesn’t change that much. You will be able to catch up.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2. Confront People And Set Boundaries.

The second thing you must do when dealing with developer burnout is almost harder than the first. That is, confront your tech lead, product manager, and developer colleagues and set some real boundaries.

Boundaries mean that you come into the office at a particular time and that you are gone afterward. They also mean no late commits at night and no coding on the weekend, at least not for your company.

The key to avoiding burnout? Learn how to say NO.

Sure, your boss might get annoyed. The product manager might go crazy. Be chill about it and address it directly. State your boundaries. Be respectful but direct. And don’t expect them to take it easy. Is that or a hospital bed.

Remember, you teach people how to treat you.

By the way, don’t worry about getting fired.

You are safe as long as you deliver enough and do not create any issues. If they quit your contract, they need to replace you. They need to go to the market and find another developer that is fit, which is very expensive.

Sure, they might threaten you, but they won’t fire you. Dogs that bark don’t bite.

3. Get Your Body Moving: If You Can Pump Some Iron

The third thing I’ve done was to get my butt out of the computer chair and go back to the gym. I started lifting weights. This wasn’t easy to stick to, but it is one of the habits that paid off the most during the last few years.

I look, feel, and am in better shape now in my thirties than when I was 25.

Why? I kept working out, and I stopped eating so much KFC. I still indulge in some grilled chicken from time to time, though.

Physical exercise has been proven to work, as well as medication for treating depression and mental health issues.
If I had to choose between moving my body or filling it up with chemicals, I would always choose the first option.

The point here is that if you are feeling burned out, do something physical. It is a much better way to deal with a bad day than eating fast food and watching Netflix.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

4. Fill Your Cup

Taking care of my health has already greatly improved my mood and motivation. I was energized and rested. Yet, despite my better mood, I felt I still lacked the passion I used to have when I first started coding.

At my job, I counted the minutes until the clock hit 5 and I could go home. At home, I was constantly looking for distractions like video games and trash TV.

That’s when I realized I needed to fall in love with coding again.

Without passion, work is just grinding.

You go through the motions but do not enjoy the moment. That’s a poor way of living. I had to get that spark back, or I would end up doing something other than software development.

When you get burned out, your motivation cup gets empty. Before returning to the game, you must fill your cup again. And make sure it stays full.

For me, I had to remind myself why I chose to become a developer in the first place. Catching up with some old developer friends also helped. I also paired programming with some Junior developers and let their enthusiasm infuse me (I still do this every time I get the chance).

Hanging out with other devs at a hackathon, getting the passion for coding back.

In my free time, I visited some engineering museums. They reminded me that no matter what kind of code I was writing, at its core, I was solving humanity’s problems.

At GraphQL Berlin, making friends, and filling my cup of passion for software.

More than coding, I was building a better future for the world and adding my little grain of sand to the collective history of programming. And thinking of all that was like getting my heart beating again. Finally, I was back.

5. Win Big, But First Win Small.

Now that I had regained my passion, it was time to accumulate some wins. I needed that dopamine shot you feel when you get things done.

Yet, my energy tank wasn’t fully recharged, so I realized it was better to stick with small steps. Complex tasks would require way too much mental effort.

This meant no big tickets and no two-week releases. I looked at our Sprint and searched for low-hanging fruit—tasks that required little effort but had a lot of value.

Small steps are even more critical when recovering from burnout.

In my case, I decided to focus on optimizing the performance of our front-end application. This involved a lot of research and testing and not too much coding. Plus, results would be clearly visible.

If you have recently recovered from burnout, I advise you to do the same. Look for the "low-hanging fruits" in your project. This can be writing one more test or fixing a small UI bug.

The point is to put one step in front of the other. To build momentum by having small victories.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

6. Switch Projects Or Jobs

No matter how many changes I made in my personal life, how much I pumped myself up before going to work, or how many breaks I took, my job was still draining me.

It’s been weeks since my burnout episode, yet nothing changed. Technical debt was still there, deadlines were still unrealistic, gossip and politics were on the rise, and my CTO was running from place to place like a headless chicken, unable to fix any of these issues.

That’s when I realized I needed to jump ship.

No matter how much advice you read about "not burning bridges" and being professional, the truth is you have to take care of yourself. Sometimes, the problem is not you; it is them. There are toxic companies and toxic software teams.

You need to find a better company to work for. To do that, you need to improve your skills and get better at technical interviews.

If your company is big enough, it might be easier to switch teams or projects. You won’t have to go to the market and interview. Yet, I still recommend keeping your technical interviewing skills sharp.

Finally, you might have to switch jobs completely.

The hard part is that jobs that burn you out leave you with little energy left to dedicate to technical interviews and getting a new job. Regardless, you will have to organize yourself somehow, push through, and make it happen.

At this point, many developers get discouraged. They think switching companies won’t make any difference because all software companies are the same.

I get it.

You have had some bad experiences in the past. Yet, if you let them hold you back, you might miss out on some great opportunities.

In reality, software companies are very different from one to another.

Some are big, others are small. Some are toxic, others are not. Some are very political. Others are meritocratic. Find one that matches your standard, and you will minimize your risk of getting burned out.

In my case, I ended up switching jobs to a much better company. They offered a better salary and a much better schedule.

Celebrating the new job with a spontaneous trip to Prague. Burnout was now just a memory.

It’s been one of the best decisions I’ve made in my whole developer career, and I like to think of that time getting burned out as the trigger for me to improve myself and get to the next level.

Finally, if you feel burned out, a mentor might help you.

Talking to a mentor about what’s going on at your job will give you an unbiased opinion on how things are going. A mentor can help you understand whether the situation is your fault. They can give you tips on how to navigate a toxic environment and share their own experiences to put you at ease.

If you want my team and I to mentor you to get to the next level in your developer career, book a chat with me here, and let's talk!

We can help you identify your technical gaps, develop a plan to achieve the next level, and give you feedback as you implement it.

Because the mentorship program is highly specialized, we can only work with a limited number of people at a time. Apply here now to join our next batch of mentees!

I hope this article helped you understand why developers burn out and what to do about it.

If you are experiencing burnout right now, implement these tips, and you will be back on track in no time!

Take care,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Should You Specialize Or Not? Solving A Developer's Dilemma

Dragos Nedelcu — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 15:44:07 +0000

Are you feeling stuck?

You spend hours doing courses and side projects. You go to Meetups, you read dozens read books and articles on how to get better as a developer.

Yet, you still feel like you are falling behind.

No matter how hard you work, you are still afraid of technical interviews.

At this point, you might think the problem is you. You don’t have what it takes to become a great software engineer. With mass tech layoffs every day and AI around the corner quitting seems like the only viable solution.

Maybe go do something else, like becoming an organic farmer or so.

Not so fast.

Maybe the cause of your lack of progress is not a lack of skills. But a lack of balance in your skills. The reality is hundreds of developers suffer from such imbalances.

And most don’t even know it.

Skill imbalances happen when you know too much about one technology or framework and too little about everything else. Or when you know too many frameworks and technologies but none deeply enough.

This is partly due to the nature of developer jobs.

Most programming jobs focus on only one stage of the software development cycle.

For example, front-end developers mostly work in the front-end. And backend developers will rarely touch frontend code.

Because despite what they like to claim, companies usually pay you for what you are already good at. They pay you for results, not for learning. Switching projects that don’t match your specialization is almost impossible.

For example, there is a tendency for bigger companies to only give you tasks you can perform. There you will make fewer mistakes, which is great for business. As a consequence, you will get stuck in one part of the stack or one technology.

Smaller companies and startups on the other hand will push as many topics as possible into the hands of the developer. These companies have a lot to do and way too few people. There you run the risk of knowing a lot about everything, but a lot about nothing.

This is why developers who worked in startups for a long time have a hard time when they go back to the job market. They are generalists in a market that loves specialists.

The reason why those skills imbalances go unsolved is because as long as you are still working on the same project or company those skills imbalances will not affect you. You have the skills needed to do the job. Everything is going great it seems.

Because developers, like any human being, adapt their skills to their environment.

Yet, when one has to go to the market and get a new developer job, such imbalances become obvious. The market requires different skills. Sometimes wide, sometimes specialized.

Most developers realize that there is a skill gap after failing technical interviews.

But that might be too late.

If you detect those skill gaps sooner, you will be able to fix your learning path and not face nasty surprises when looking for your next developer job.

To understand skill imbalances, we will first have to understand the different profiles of developers they create. And how to fix those gaps and get to the next level.

Let’s start with the first and most basic type of developer skills imbalance…

1. The Jack/Jane of all trades

This is the kind of developer that knows a bit of everything, but a lot of nothing. You can usually find them as technical co-founders in startups—or freelance consultants.

As the name says, this kind of developer gets their hands dirty with everything. Jack/Janes of all trades are extremely useful when it comes to building minimum viable projects, or projects with a short lifespan (like the ones web agencies receive).

Yet, when the requirements get more complex, this developer lacks the technical depth required to get the job done. For example, advanced software topics like performance, testing, or architecture will be a challenge for Jack/Jane of all trades.

Image Credit: The Internet

The solution for this kind of software developer is to pick one technology and specialize.

This brings us to the next type of developer skill imbalance…

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2. The I-Shaped Developer

The kind of developer that has technical depth in one part of the tech stack only. Which can make them incredibly productive in some situations and ineffective in others.

One example is the React developer, who has a very solid understanding of React, but once you take them out of a React codebase they are lost. Or the frontend developer that has never touched the full stack.

For example, an I-shape skill distribution can make you incredibly productive in big companies. In big teams, specialization is king. Those kinds of teams need programmers who can solve very specific problems at scale.

Think about the front-end developers at a big company like Meta. One small button on the home page might have a whole team working on it. Those developers are most likely highly specialized.

One thing I-Shape developers will constantly fall short of is seeing the bigger picture. As the saying goes, when you have a hammer all you see is nails.

Image Credits: Tut And Groan

This kind of developer often lacks the generic skills and context to see beyond their specialization. This is why they get stuck at the Junior/Mid Level unless they progress to the next stage.

3. The T-Shaped Developer

This is the type of developer every coder should aspire to become. They have very balanced skills. This includes a considerable technical depth in their specialization of choice paired with the generic skills to deliver end-to-end.

T-shaped developers are quick to adapt to changes and work independently. Many times they act as a bridge expertise across different development teams. They can communicate with both the backend and frontend team as they understand both.

Funny because it is true, full-stack T-shaped developers can do a lot of different things while still being deeply specialized.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

4. The X-shaped developer

Finally, the X-shaped developer is a person who has mastered the T-shape of different specializations and also has a lot of generic software skills.

They are simultaneously technically deep into the front end, the back end, infrastructure, and software architecture. They know about the CSS DOM and they know about HTTP caching. They deliver projects end-to-end.

Image Credits: Grumo

X-shaped Developers are the ones making the hard technical decisions in the team. Even if companies try to pull them into management, many choose to stay technical as staff and principal engineers.

What sets them apart from most developers, is that due to their technical depth, they can operate at the edge of the tech stack. X-shaped engineers can deal with migrations, integrations, edge cases, and everything that Junior, Mid, and even Senior developers can’t get done.

Though not everyone can become an X-Shape developer, it is something that most software engineers should aim for.

This is it!

Now you have a much clearer understanding of the types of developers out there depending on their skill distribution. Keep these mental models in mind when you are choosing new skills to learn or looking for a new developer job.

If you are curious about which kind of developer you are, what are your technical gaps and what to do to improve, take this Free Technical Assessment. It will show you exactly what you are lacking.

Take care,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

How Developers Can Survive AI: 3 Hidden Skills To Become Irreplaceable 🤖

Dragos Nedelcu — Mon, 11 Mar 2024 19:16:10 +0000

Imagine you spent decades improving your coding skills.

Just to see ChatGPT solving coding problems you still struggle with, in a few seconds. What’s worse, these AI tools are only getting better.

Your job, your passion, and your future are being tossed away in just a few seconds.

By a cold-hearted piece of software running billions of calculations in the blink of an eye.

That’s the situation thousands of developers are facing right now.

Every time they use ChatGPT and Github Copilot, they are reminded of their human inadequacy. Of the little computational ability our brain has compared to a machine. Let alone a very big machine (ChatGPT is hosted across several data centers).

AI tools can already do many of the tasks that used to require a human developer. They write code, test it, review it, and suggest improvements.

While many developers are using those tools to become more productive, some are afraid they will become a lot more than a simple productivity booster.

These algorithms could soon replace developers completely.

I think the fear of being made obsolete that many developers are feeling is justified.

But, while I do believe AI will replace a good chunk of coding, I don’t believe it will replace developers anytime soon.

This is because, behind the mechanical act of coding, there is a set of hidden skills that will make human developers irreplaceable for years to come.

In this article, I will show you exactly what those skills are. You will also learn how to leverage them in your everyday life so you become irreplaceable no matter how smart ChatGPT and Github Copilot will become.

What are meta-skills?

Meta skills are skills that allow you to learn and improve other skills. Think of them as the skills behind the skills. It is a bit abstract so let me explain.

For example, when you are learning Spanish, the Spanish language is the core skill.

But, the meta-skill you are learning is, how to learn a new language.

That "skill behind the skill", the learning a new language skill, is much more valuable in the long run than speaking Spanish itself.

Same in software development.

When you are learning JavaScript, you are not only learning the language itself. You are learning how to learn a programming language and how to think in a structured way.

You are not learning how to code, you are learning how to think.

In my case, learning how to code forced me to learn how to learn. Mastering this skill allowed me to understand what are the principles behind becoming a Senior Developer. Which allowed me to start theSeniorDev.com and help other developers get to the Senior level faster as well.

This is why the first and most crucial meta-skill you will have to master to stay relevant as a developer in the age of AI will be learning how to learn…

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

1. The Skill Behind Learning

You might not believe me, but humans are very fast learners. Computers on the other hand, are not that fast. They might seem fast because they can handle a lot more data than we humans can. But the thing is we don’t need as much data as they do to reach the same level of learning.

While machine learning models need hundreds of data points to optimize their algorithms, humans use heuristics to simplify reality and learn faster.

A human baby doesn’t need to look at 10.000 pictures of birds to know what a bird is. Just show them a few pictures of a bird and they will be able to easily spot one when they see it.

You might disagree with me.

As a developer, you are spending countless hours improving your skills. But you still feel like you struggle to catch up.

That’s because software development is a very complex skill. And it doesn’t take away the fact that you are probably a very fast learner.

The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. - Alvin Toffler, Futurist

Well, to stay relevant you will have to double down on the skill of learning. But, how can you master the skill of learning new skills…

How to learn faster as a developer?

From all the tips and tricks I tried through the years, I only found one that works the best. It is not chunking information, space repetition, the Feynman technique, or any other fancy learning technique.

The best way to be more efficient in your learning is to master the art of focus.

Keep on learning and teach those machines a lesson.

Focusing is as much a skill as it is a mindset. I will go as far as saying that focusing is the skill where Senior Developers outperform Junior Developers the most.

What does focus mean in practice?

Focusing includes being able to sort information into categories and make connections. Being able to sustain attention and minimize distractions. And being able to filter important information from unimportant ones. All these abilities can be improved through practice.

Mastering the Fundamentals and getting into the habit of prioritizing quality over quantity will already make wonders for your developer career.

‍Action Item: get into the habit of saying no. Filter the newsletters you are subscribed to, the videos you watch, and the amount of libraries and frameworks you are learning at any given time.

You’ve seen that to be able to focus, you will need to be able to filter information.

But you can’t filter information if you are not able to think for yourself and decide what is important and what is not. Which brings me to the next meta-skill developers need to master…

2. To Be Human Is To Think, To Think Critically

How did Galileo discover that the world was not flat when everyone else was convinced of the opposite? Albert Einstein went even further and questioned the nature of space and time, discovering relativity in the process.

The names of these people went into history because they were able to think critically.

Critical thinking is the only way to push human knowledge forward.

But, what is critical thinking in the first place? And how can you as a software developer improve this skill? To put it short you can think critically when you can break down complex problems into pieces, analyse and evaluate information to make decisions.

Critical thinking helps you make sense out of confusing information.

It is one of the hardest skills to master.

That is because it involves a multitude of other skills. The fastest way to develop critical thinking is to start trying to reach conclusions by yourself.

At its core, critical thinking means not taking what you are being told for granted.

Ohh really? Image Credit: ImgFlip

For example, when a more Senior developer in your team says an SQL database is a better choice than a document-based one, like MongoDB, ask yourself why.

When YouTubers tell you that to stand out as a developer you need to contribute to open source, ask yourself if that’s the case. Make your hypothesis and test it out.

When people say you need to know data structures and algorithms to get a better job. Before you sink hours into Leetcode, go to the market yourself and see how many technical interviews are demanding data structures.

Critical thinking alone will make you more independent in your work as a developer. And if getting ahead is what you want, solving problems independently is one of the key traits developers should show for them to be considered Senior.

Developers who can think critically will have a considerable advantage over machines. Current AI models won’t be able to think by themselves for years to come.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3. The fuel of knowledge

What’s the secret ingredient behind human discovery? What drove our ancestors to explore? To build all the major inventions that got humanity where it is today? From herding animals to writing to space travel and computers, humans always wanted more.

We first traveled the land. Then we got onto the sea, the air, and onto the sky. The more we discovered, the more we wanted. And finally, we are about to build intelligent computers. Which will eventually surpass our own intelligence.

The fuel of our quest for knowledge?

Curiosity. The desire to know. To discover. To see what’s possible.

It might kill cats, but have the opposite effect on developers.

Curiosity is a mix of logical reason and human desire. That human desire is something machines will probably never develop. Developers who are looking to work among machines that are smarter than them will have to leverage their hunger for knowledge to gain an edge.

The best developers I know were never the most knowledgeable in their teams.

But they were the most curious. The most hungry for knowledge. The more passionate about software development and the wonders it helps us create.

How can you become more curious?

Fall in love with the craft. Add some extra passion to your day.

Look around at all the tools you are working with and ask yourself “What else?”.

What else can I do to improve this code? Why is our release so slow? Why do we have 80% test coverage? Why not 100%? And why is the Senior Developer so crazy about code quality?

This is it.

If you are a developer looking to stay relevant in the age of machines, focus on these three traits and you have your best shot.

Regardless of whether AI will surpass human intelligence in the next few decades or not, these skills will make a much better software engineer and human.

Let's kick the crap our of those machines!

Take care,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Senior Frontend Developer Roadmap 2024: 5 Steps To Next Level 🔥

Dragos Nedelcu — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 15:31:00 +0000

Are you a Frontend Developer wanting to level up?

But at the same time, you feel overwhelmed by the quantity of advice you find online. With no clear roadmap to follow towards the Senior level?

You tried online courses, you tried side-projects and you tried asking the Senior Frontend developers around you how to improve.

Only to get even more confused.

Frontend Developers reading another article telling them about 5 shinny JavaScript libraries they never heard of before.

Some tell you that to get to Senior, you need to master the basics.

Others say that it is more about being able to deliver applications end-to-end. The full stack skills. Like brushing up on your backend knowledge or getting AWS certified.

Finally, others claim technical skills alone are not enough to get to Senior. You need to work on your soft skills and leadership abilities.

All of that advice is partly right.

None of it is helping you.

You do need all those things, but what matters the most are by far technical skills. Strong Fundamentals and End-to-End Delivery are the bare minimum.

But for you to become a Senior Frontend Developer you need to be able to influence other developers around you and make technical decisions. To be seen as an expert in your field.

Technical mastery means technical depth beyond just writing code.

Having a good grasp of topics like Testing, Scalability, and Performance. Understanding basic architectural patterns beyond what comes out of the box in a standard JavaScript framework.

Yet, despite the importance of technical skills, most front-end Developers are not Senior yet because their technical skills are not deep enough.

Today I will show you exactly how to reach the Senior level of technical mastery.

I will share with you a clear step-by-step roadmap for you to get to Senior Frontend Developer and beyond. Regardless of the level you are at right now, you will know exactly what you need to do to get to the next level.

Including specific tools, frameworks, and principles needed for you to get to the Senior level.

If you are a Senior Frontend Developer already, you can use this Roadmap as a checklist to make sure you are on the right track.

Why is this Roadmap better than anything you’ve seen before?

There are tons of articles claiming to have what you need to become a Senior Frontend Developer.

But, in reality most articles only leave you more confused because:

Most roadmaps focus on “what to learn”, but not on “why” to learn it
They obsess over specific frameworks instead of principles that last for a lifetime
They don’t adapt to existing knowledge, technical level, and the job market
They haven’t been tested in the real world
They don’t point you to specific resources for you to study
The Frontend Roadmap is exactly what we used to help 250+ developers get to the Senior level and beyond. It’s been battle-tested in the real world again and again.

It’s also been built for busy developers with little time to waste on random tutorials and courses.

Developers with a full-time job, and a family or a life outside work. It contains as little as possible and as much as necessary for you to make it to Senior level.

Let’s jump right in!

We will begin by refreshing some of your existing JavaScript knowledge…

Things You Should Know Before You Proceed

Before diving in into this roadmap, I will assume you are familiar with Junior/Mid-level Frontend topics.

Things like JavaScript fundamentals, TypeScript, and basic knowledge of the frontend framework you are working with. Trying to grasp Senior Frontend concepts without prior knowledge will be much harder as you will have to fill too many gaps.

If you want to refresh your fundamentals, here is a Free JavaScript Fundamentals Roadmap we’ve put together for you. For more resources like this check our Free Community for JavaScript Developers.

You might expect me to start this Roadmap with a new brand JavaScript framework, like React or Angular. Or something more fancy, like Svelte, Next.js, or Remix.

Instead, we will focus on a fundamental piece of frontend development…

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

1. Frontend Tooling

The first topic we focus on is Frontend Tooling, particularly how module bundlers like Webpack work, how they are configured, and how they fit in the bigger picture.

1.1 Module Bundlers

This knowledge is crucial because Module Bundlers are at the core of most popular JavaScript frameworks. Many of the tricky console errors, edge cases, and application configs you will have to deal with as a Senior will involve them.

A good mastery of Module Bundlers will also give you a better understanding of how JavaScript works, beyond frameworks, and how the browser processes your JavaScript bundle.

It will allow you to lead your team when it comes to setting up new JavaScript applications or optimising existing ones.

You will be able to know what is the source code of your application, what’s going into your ‘build' folder, and why. And you will be able to come up with ways to improve the performance and scalability of your frontend applications.

In the case of module bundlers, Webpack is a good starting point.

That feeling when you finally understand the Webpack config you’ve been using every day for the last 3 years.

You will want to explore its inner workings, extensions, and documentation in depth(three shaking). Finally, give it a shot yourself and build a production-ready application from scratch.

1.2 Linting And Code Quality

You probably worked with tools like ESLint and Prettier. Well, it is now time to go deeper and learn how to set them up from scratch.

Part of a Senior Developer’s job is making sure the code quality of the team stays high. For that coding standards must be integrated and automated into the development process, not just talked about.

This is exactly what tools like Prettier do.

If you want to go the extra mile, you can integrate these tools into your deployment pipeline and Git hooks with tools like Husky to make sure every Git commit your team makes complies to the coding standards you agreed on.

Senior Dev Tip: Now that you are looking at bundlers, understanding the module federation pattern will make you stand out from the mass of front-end developers. We will dive deeper into this concept in the Frontend Architecture section as it is foundational to building Micro Frontends.

2. Building Frontend Apps: Component Driven Development

Most modern JavaScript frameworks are built following the same architectural patterns. Once you master these patterns you will be able to master new frameworks with ease.

One of those core patterns is encapsulating code in smaller pieces of code called Components.

This is what Component Driven Development is all about and it includes Component Design and Component Testing. I could write a full article about this, here we will focus on the major patterns and implications Components bring to the table.

Starting with…

2.1 State Management

The most important pattern when talking about Components (and any UI in general) is State. To understand the state, one needs to understand the “State Machine” pattern, as well as the concepts of Essential State and Derived state.

Moving on, you will be ready to get deeper into the “Hierarchy Of States” starting with Component State, Shared State, and Global State.

Then onto the different use cases that involve State.

They include Form State (including Input Validation), Data Fetching, and Prop Drilling, as well as the different patterns and tools to implement state.

State Management includes the Reducer Pattern in the case of Shared State with useReducer and the different libraries to manage Global State. From 3rd Party libraries to internal built-in functionality.

React Developers trying to choose the best State Management solution.

For example, in the case of React, we have Redux, Zustand, and Recoil as popular 3rd Party libraries and the Provider Pattern/Context API.

Senior Dev Tip: Senior Frontend Developers think differently. They start with a Mental Model first, then proceed with the implementation. One of those Mental Models is the Virtual Dom pattern implemented by major JavaScript frameworks, with React and Vue being their major adopters.

2.2 Frontend Design Patterns: Virtual Dom

The browser DOM, which is a representation of your web page that you need to manipulate when you make changes, is pretty slow.

The solution to this is to make a memory copy of the actual DOM called the Virtual Dom. Making changes in memory is much faster than changing the real DOM. We can change the real DOM batching changes from the Virtual DOM and so make everything much faster.

The most important concepts here are the Diffing Algorithm and the Reconciliation process. They are responsible for minimising the amount of changes and the performance gains.

The Virtual DOM pattern is used by both React and Vue.js, two major JavaScript frameworks.

Senior Dev Tip: Now that you understand the “Why” behind the Virtual DOM, you should be able to answer the million-dollar question: “Why is React so fast?”, which will come up in most React Frontend interviews.

2.2 Browser APIs

Finally, a Senior Frontend Developer is expected to know how to interact with the Web Browser directly and its more advanced features.

A critical part of any Frontend application is authentication and data storage.

A Senior Frontend Developer is required to be familiar with different authentication and storage mechanisms present in the browser. Those include cookies, local storage, and session storage.

Another very important Browser API is the History API which is used by all modern frameworks to mimic HTTP-like routing in SPAs (Single Page Applications).

Senior Dev Tip: Understanding the History API and routing will make the difference between spending 5 minutes or 5 days debugging a blank page error.

2.3 Accessibility (a11y)
Most Senior Frontend Interviews will contain some questions about Accessibility. Important if you work for the government or public institutions. They might have a very diverse user group and are heavily regulated. Matters less if you work for fast-growing startups.

Senior Frontend Developers know Grandma is checking their websites and make it easier for her to do so.

The core concepts you need to master regarding Accessibility are the WCAG(Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) and Semantic HTML.

2.4 CSS Fundamentals

You might love it or hate it, but CSS is still at the core of frontend development. The good news for you is you don’t need to be a CSS wizard to be a Senior Frontend Developer.

But you do need to master the fundamentals of working with CSS. These include core CSS concepts like Flex Box, The Box Model, CSS Specificity rules, and some CSS Frameworks. Like Tailwind CSS.

JavaScript Developers trying to center a DIV.

If we are talking about JavaScript frameworks, knowing how CSS in JS works and what is the impact of CSS on application performance (think critical CSS) will get you a long way.

2.5 Web Security & Authentication

Security might sound very confusing to front-end developers. Particularly self-taught developers most of which don’t even know what Web Security is about.

The good news is that if you master these 2 Core Fundamentals, you will have covered 80% of your web security needs.

Those are CORS and HTTPS.

For starters, memorising a few HTTP status codes like 200, 404, 500, 301, and 302 will do wonders. They are crucial while debugging. And they will make you stand out when red warnings appear in the console.

While your colleagues will be searching StackOverflow, you will already know what’s going on behind that failing request.

A Senior developer should also be familiar with modern Authentication and Authorization techniques. Most of them are based on the OAuth2 framework.

Don’t be a JavaScript Clown and learn some Web Security.

The deeper you can go into the access token lifecycle, and the different vulnerabilities that an attacker can exploit the more Senior you will come across like.

Senior Dev Tip: For status codes and headers, this Mozilla MDN section is the way to go. Yes, a Senior Frontend Developer is supposed to know the difference between the GET and POST HTTP verbs.

Senior Dev Tip: If you want to go above and beyond, knowing some HTTP headers goes a long way. In the case of responses, headers like Accept, Host, User-Agent; and in the case of responses things like Cache-Control, Content-Type, Content-Encoding.

Senior Dev Tip: If you are going to a technical interview with a company in the insurance or banking sector, make sure you review security before the interview. Check the OWASP checklist.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3. Web Performance

When your product manager comes complaining that "the Website is slow", a Senior Frontend Developer is supposed to explain why is happening, what “slow” means, and how to make it faster.

Been there, done that.

The truth is a solid mastery of Web Performance techniques will make you a much better web developer overall. It will teach you how the browser works at its core beyond the abstractions that JavaScript frameworks impose.

The challenge here is that web performance is a vast field.

And Senior Frontend Developers are required to know quite a lot about it. But at the same time, it is hard to find a unified list of what web performance entails.

For the sake of structure, we will split it into 6 main categories:

3.1 Server Optimisation

To start optimising the frontend, we need to look beyond JavaScript. Server-level optimization usually includes some form of caching, mainly HTTP caching. This is first done at Browser level.

Caching is at its core saving a copy of the data/files that your users require most often and serving them that copy, instead of making a trip to the database and back.

You could cache(save) that copy at different levels. You could save it on the browser. On a server geographically closer to your client (CDN). Or in your backend to avoid doing expensive operations again and again.

Other parts concerning server optimisation involve storing your static assets (CSS, HTML, and images) on a CDN. You should be familiar with how CDNs work and how to set one up.

Senior Dev Tip: setting up a CDN is pretty straightforward, and many cloud providers like Cloudfare do this out of the box. Now that you are there you can also read more about how CDNs work.

3.2 Images Optimisation

Big heavy images are one of the main reasons why frontend applications start getting slow.

If you are working for an e-commerce application this is even more important. You will have tons of high-quality and heavy images to deal with. Same as with CSS, you don’t need to be a guru when it comes to image optimization.

But you do need to know what are the best formats when using images on the Web.

You should be familiar with common algorithms for image compression (Gzip, Brotli), conversion to WebP, resizing, and responsive images with the srcset attribute.

3.3 Fonts Optimisation

Optimizing fonts mainly involves preloading, leveraging the preload functionality, using the "display swap" feature of the browser, and limiting the number of fonts you are using (you might have to negotiate this with your UX designer).

3.4 CSS Optimization

Optimizing CSS comes down to mostly 2 techniques. Making it smaller by minifying it and compressing it correctly.

And using it wisely. Loading only what you need to render the above the fold portion of the website a.k.a. the Critical CSS. Bonus if you know how to set this up using your JavaScript bundler.

Senior Dev Tip: remember, your CSS is a static asset, so your CDN will most likely do the heavy lifting when it comes to performance by storing it closer to the user.

3.5 JavaScript Optimization

Optimizing your JavaScript gets us back to the beginning of this article: module bundlers. A lot of JavaScript performance optimizations will be done around your JavaScript Bundle.

Frontend Developer life in 2024 and beyond.

Once again, JavaScript can be faster by minifying and compressing it correctly as well as chunking it and serving it to the browser in an optimized way.

First, you want to focus on minimization, uglification, and compression techniques.

Afterward, move on to more advanced features like Code Splitting (including PRPL Pattern and Static Imports) as well as Server Side Rendering. In the case of SSR, I will dive deeper into it in the architecture section of this article.

The whole process of rendering on the server is quite new and complex. So it deserves a full article by itself. Let me know if you want me to write one in the comments :)

3.6 Framework Optimization

Finally, optimizing at the framework level will be specific to the framework you use.

Even though Angular, React, and Vue share many patterns, performance optimization is quite different from framework to framework.

In the case of React, being familiar with the following concepts and their implementation, from React.Lazy, to React.Memo, to the useMemo and useCallback hooks.

Funny because is true.

Those are quite complex features and I won’t dive deep into them here, but if you want me to write a concept strictly on the topic of React framework optimization, let me know in the comments.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

4. CI/CD: Complete Software Lifecycle

Deploying with a one-click deployment to services like Netlify or Vercel might be very rewarding but it doesn’t teach you much about how the Cloud works.

What’s worse, not understanding the deployment lifecycle of your applications will make you look like a Junior Developer in most technical interviews.

A Senior Frontend Developer knows how to set up a deployment pipeline on an established cloud Platform like AWS. Ideally, they also know how to scale it, using services like CloudFront.

Do you need to get AWS certified as a front-end developer?
Not really.

I mean, if you have the time and resources, then go ahead and do it. Just be ready for a 3 to 6 months commitment.

A quicker way frontend developers can master CI/CD is by trying to deploy your frontend applications to a production-like environment on one of those platforms.

AWS for example offers plenty of free tutorials on how to deploy on their platform and a very generous free tire plan so you can do it for free.

Senior Dev Tip: If you want to go even further into Senior level topics, get a good grasp of Containerization, with tools like Docker and Infrastructure as Code. This will get you closer and closer to the back and full stack development skills. You might have to decide if you want to stay a Frontend Developer or move into Backend and FullStack Engineering.

5. Frontend Architecture

Now that you have a solid understanding of JavaScript and its frameworks as well as common browser APIs, you are ready to tackle a more abstract topic: Frontend Architecture.

Current software architecture topics in the frontend usually come up around two main topics, Micro Frontends and Server Side Rendering.

5.1 Micro Frontends

As Frontend Applications scale, so do the developer team that builds them. Yet, big teams are harder to manage and slower. The bigger the developer team, the more effort in making sure everyone is on the same page.

Frontend developers inspired themselves in how backend teams deal with scaling issues, via micro-services architecture, and created micro frontends. In this way, developers can split frontend applications into smaller ones and manage them independently.

5.1.2 How Micro Frontends Work

Micro Frontends allows you to scale your frontend team by breaking big monolithic frontend applications into smaller ones.

Every Frontend Developer in 2024 and their team jumping on the Micro-frontends hype train.

You can then have small frontend teams managing each of those smaller applications. These smaller applications can be deployed individually, which allows teams to be relatively independent.

5.1.2 Technical Challenges Of Micro Frontends: Monorepos & Design Systems

Despite the huge progress made in the last years in Micro Frontends, they still represent one of the biggest technical challenges for frontend developers right now.

Having different applications means different repositories and deployment pipelines.

It also means different coding styles. Different teams will need to agree on the kind of interfaces, coding standards, and philosophies they want to share.

On the technical side, micro-frontends entail many challenges. First of all, CSS is a global language, a solution will be needed for different teams to avoid class naming conflicts.

Second, integrating each Micro Frontend into a root application which will be responsible for routing, authentication, and service discovery is already a huge technical challenge.

Finally, sharing data between different Micro Frontends (from global state to internationalization) as well as unifying interfaces for different teams won’t be easy.

This is why MicroFrontends are generally considered a Senior-level topic in the frontend community.

Senior Dev Tip: MicroFrontends will push the knowledge of everything you know about frontend development, its pros and cons, its current state of the art, and its current limitations. This is what makes it a must to understand for any frontend developer aiming to become a Senior.

Senior Dev Tip: No matter how fancy the Architecture, if it is JavaScript, it will still be based on core browser features like "import maps". Module federation for example, which is at the core of micro frontends uses imports maps under the hood.

Monorepos: Most companies that use MicroFrontends will also implement a Monorepo pattern to manage their code. The bare minimum here will be for you to understand how the Monorepo is structured and how you can contribute. Also, get an idea of how the Monorepo is being deployed. Knowing Docker even at the basic level will be a lifesaver here. You can check build tools like I think it was Turborepo to dive deep into monorepos.

Design Systems: Packaging components for another team to use. For this, you will need to be familiar with the NPM package life-cycle, how to publish, and how to consume an NPM package, and how semantic versioning works.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

5.2 Server-Side-Rendering (SSR)

Server Side Rendering allows you to render your JavaScript application on the server before sending it to the browser, increasing web performance and SEO. This is not easy as SPAs were built with CSR (client-side rendering) in mind.

5.2.1 How SSR Works

With SSR you render your SPA on the server first, generating a static HTML page. Now the user will fetch the complete HTML, which will be displayed instantly.

This is much faster than the CSR way. Fetching a JavaScript bundle, waiting for it to be parsed and interpreted, and manipulating the DOM to paint the page.

Those good old days when CSR was still a thing.

Your pre-rendered HTML page you sent has no functionality yet. To add functionality, you need JavaScript. So you kind of render twice. That’s a big technical challenge (like making sure what you are rendering on the server is the same as what will be rendered on the client).

And you will still have to wait for that JS Bundle to arrive and be parsed to be able to have any functionality (like clicking buttons). That is one pitfall of SSR that any front-end developer using it should be aware of.

Some might even call server-side rendering an anti-pattern.

Yet, understanding how to render JavaScript server-side will teach you so much about how the language works and the browser as well.

5.3 BFF: Backend for Frontend

Having a MicroFrontend Architecture or having different types of clients(mobile app, web app) consuming data from the backend means the backend REST APIs will need to adapt to all those different requirements.

A mobile app might need the same data as the web app but in a different format. This adds a lot of complexity to the backend.

To solve this problem, the BFF(backend-for-frontend pattern) has been invented. It basically means having a backend layer close to the frontend.

This backend layer belongs to the frontend. The BFF does the necessary data fetching and other functions (like Authentication and Authorization).

If that's how your Backend For Frontend looks like, better look for a new developer job.

The funny part is that in most companies, the frontend team is responsible for the BFF. Which makes a lot of sense because they are the ones who understand the specific needs each and every client application has.

As a Senior Frontend Developer, you will be supposed to know how to extend API Endpoints or GraphQL Resolvers.

You must understand authentication in machine-to-machine communication and basic API Design patterns. Ideally, you will also need to have a solid understanding of HTTP, which is the blood of the web.

This will involve getting a bit deeper into the backend than you are used to. Yet, it might be the best thing you’ve done so far as I will open the door for you to step into full-stack engineering with more and better job opportunities.

This is it!

If you are looking to become a Senior Frontend Developer in 2024, this is a proven Roadmap you can follow.

Now that you know the steps to the next level, it is only a matter of taking action.

So go get them future Senior Dev!

I will see you in the next one,

Take care,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

What Is Really A Senior Developer: Core Principles

Dragos Nedelcu — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 11:41:26 +0000

Ever wondered what is missing?

You’ve done hundreds of online courses, built dozens of side projects, and watched countless software development videos on YouTube.

But, you still struggle.

Stuck at the same level and not making any real progress. You know you have the talent and you are putting in the work, yet something is missing.

You see other developers less talented than you doing better. You have friends who started to code at the same time as you did. But now have better jobs and earn more.

So you start doubting yourself.

Should you be a software developer after all? Or have you made the wrong career choice?

Chill down. Before you throw your new mechanical keyboard in the garbage, let me tell you this.

You are not alone.

Thousands of developers struggle daily just as you do. Most don’t want to talk about it, because it would make them vulnerable.

But, they suffer in silence.

At the same time, there is way too much advice online about what you should do.

Yet, despite the millions of articles claiming to have the magic pill, most developers I talk to still don’t have a clear idea of how to progress.

What’s worse, many convinced themselves that they don’t have what it takes to become a Senior developer. So it might be better to quit and do something else than writing code.

They lack a clear understanding of what it takes to become a Senior developer.

In this article, I will show you exactly what a Senior developer is, how they behave, and how they think. I will do so by sharing timeless principles Senior developers adhere to. Not tips, nor tricks.

But, there’s a catch.

Technical knowledge changes and it is very specific to your tech stack.

So we will focus on the things that don’t change. We will focus on the traits a Software Developer should master in order for them to deliver at the Senior level and beyond.

If you learn these Senior Developer traits, everything will get easier. You will progress faster, feel confident in your skills, make more money, and work less.

Here they are in no specific order:

"A Senior Developer Has Mastered “The Fundamentals"

The most important trait of a Senior Developer is they have mastered the core concepts behind their tech stack. They understand things way beyond the surface. For example, if you are a JavaScript Developer, this means knowing the JavaScript language, and its syntax. From Closures to Asynchronous Programming and Prototype Inheritance. It also means mastering at least one major JavaScript framework. Whether it is React, Angular, or Vue, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you don’t only understand how to work with it, but also why it has been designed that way. The patterns behind it, and why its creators made those technical choices when creating it. This will allow you to stand out and be able to influence other developers via your expertise. When you can explain why things happen, and why you made a certain technical decision, other developers will look up to you. One of the quickest ways to stand out as a Senior.

A Senior Developer Knows How To Balance Best Practices With Delivery

Senior Developers go beyond “making it work”. They avoid hacking things, and they avoid shortcuts. When they take a shortcut, it is because there is no other choice. They know which shortcuts they can take, and which ones they don’t. They know that technical debt is very dangerous. Messy code over a long period of time can even bankrupt companies. They also know it can be easily avoided by building great habits into your software. Is not that they don’t want to go fast. They want to go as fast as they can without ruining the application. In the words of the scouts, Senior Developers always leave the camp better than they found it.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

A Senior Developer Knows How To Set Boundaries

Senior Developers know how to push back when people cross the line. When stakeholders become too demanding, asking for unreasonable features and deadlines, a Senior Developer knows how to say NO. They also know how to make stakeholders aware of the cost of their demands. And they know how to offer alternatives. And if nothing works, they don’t give it, and hold on to their guns. They don’t agree with an implementation if they know it doesn't make sense. They prefer to make a few people angry at the beginning, instead of losing face at the end, when the project fails. Or worse, damaging the whole development team by promising something they can’t deliver on.

A Senior Developer Knows The Value Of Focus

It is not that they don’t keep an eye on the newest and shiniest JavaScript framework out there. Or the latest AI tool. They put effort into staying up to date. But, they don't let the noise distract them from the main thing. Senior Developers prefer quality and quantity. They limit the number of “gurus” they follow and the newsletters they read. They know the only way to achieve more is by doing less. This is why they get their priorities straight. They narrow down on one goal before starting the other.

A Senior Developer Has Mastered End-To-End Delivery

This is why everyone wants to have Senior Developers on their teams. They deliver value from day one. They can make sense out of messy codebases, unclear requirements, and difficult stakeholders and somehow deliver anyway. They can drive a feature, from the design phase to coding, testing, and deployment. Senior Developers are familiar with all the different tools involved in taking their code to production.

A Senior Developer Has Mastered The Technical Interview

Senior Developers are not afraid about losing their jobs because they know they can get another one fast. Because they mastered the art of doing technical interviews. I am calling it an art and not a science because, in technical interviews, even if you do everything right, you can still fail. If they start looking for a new developer job, they might need some time to get used to interviewing, to warm up. But, they have most of the skills necessary to clear all the interview processes.

A Senior Developer Knows The Market

Being a starving artist doesn’t pay. A Senior Developer knows having great technical skills is not enough. You need to know who can hire you, and what they can pay for you. Even if they are happily employed, Senior devs, keep an eye on the market at all times. Recessions and layoffs are more and more common and no matter how much of a good job you make, you never know what will happen.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

A Senior Developer Knows How To Negotiate

Part of being a Senior Developer is knowing your worth and advocating for it. It means not being afraid to walk away when they don’t give you what you want, but at the same time always looking for win-win situations with the people and companies you choose to work with. Senior devs also know that the best negotiation trick

A Senior Developer Has Mentors

The Senior Developer knows that no matter how smart and knowledgeable they are, they can’t know everything. More importantly, they don’t know what they don’t know. Senior developers y are always looking for people who can help them in their journey. This can be people who are a bit ahead in their journey with respect to them, like their Tech Lead or their CTO. Or it can be people from other domains with certain expertise (leadership, accountability, mindset etc). Software development is a very complex field and knowledge from the right source can make it a lot easier to navigate.

A Senior Developer Mentors Others

I haven’t yet met a great Senior Developer who doesn’t mentor others. This can be a Junior developer at their job, but not always. It can be their 9-year-old nephew who is starting coding. Or their 15-year-old sister is building her first web application. Whoever is willing to learn, the Senior developer will be willing to teach. Mentoring others allows you, no matter how Senior you are, to refine your own knowledge. But also to give back some of that passion to the new generation of developers.

A Senior Developer Takes Care Of Themselves

You can’t fill up someone else's cup if yours is empty. Software Development is a very challenging job. Sometimes it will take the best of you. You will have to work long hours, you will have to go through stressful moments, and, have little time for yourself. On top of that, staring at a computer for 50 hrs per week is very bad for your health. Senior Developers intentionally make time for themselves—time for introspection and learning. They try to eat right, exercise at least a few times a week, and take time off. No release is worth your health. This goes hand in hand with setting boundaries.

A Senior Developer Is Well Networked

Most Software Engineers are very analytical. They are obsessed with the “real value” of things. But the truth is, no matter how good you are, if you don’t know how to sell yourself, you will struggle to pay rent. This is even more real at the Senior level when office politics get more and more important. That’s when it is not only about what you know but about who knows about you. This is why Senior developers are well-networked. They know people in their team, in their company, and the software ecosystem overall. This allows them to influence technical decisions. It also allows them to bounce ideas off, whether that is about a specific Software Architecture, JavaScript Framework, or a job position. A good network will add tremendous value to your skills. If Senior is what you want, make sure you pay attention to your network and the communities you join.

A Senior Developer Creates Value

Senior Developers know that with great power, comes great responsibility. They use their skills for the good. Everywhere they go, they look for ways to improve things. To create value. Senior Developers fix problems, projects, and teams. They look for a win-win. Sometimes they will do this for money. Other times they will do this out of curiosity and passion. Even when there is nothing to build, they add value by sharing their passion and their knowledge. This is part of who they are and part of their legacy. Because when all is gone, it is the lives they touched through their creations that matter.

This is not a fixed list, and I will add more Senior Developer Principles to it as I discover them.

This is also not the only way for you to get to Senior. But, they are great guidelines to keep you focused in the right direction.

Apply them in your developer career and see how the level of everything you do will go up.

I will see you in the next one,

Dragos

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

5 Crazy Things To Get Your Dev Career Unstuck 🏆

Dragos Nedelcu — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 17:44:17 +0000

Are you feeling stuck?

You’ve been writing code for a while but you feel like by now you should be a bit further ahead in your developer journey?

Are you sick of traditional advice like doing more online courses and side-projects? Or wait a few years to get more experience?

You’ve also probably been told that the solution for you to get to the next level is some new library or framework you haven’t heard of. But deep inside you know the answer cannot be that simple.

Today I will share with you 5 things that might seem either crazy or common sense. Regardless, they will take your developer career to a whole new level.

These principles boil down 10+ years of experience writing code.

They have nothing to do with your tech stack. But everything to do with your overall success as a developer. When put in place correctly, they will help you reach technical mastery and get your career to a whole new level.

Let’s start with the first and most important…

1. Do The Thing.

What if I told you that all the challenges you are facing in your developer career are due to one thing only?

And that thing has nothing to do with a new fancy JavaScript framework, Data Structure, or Design Pattern.

You feel stuck because you fail to do “the Thing”.

You think about it. You plan to do it. But you still don’t do it.

What is “the Thing”?

The Thing is anything you need to do right now to move your career forward. It can be applying to jobs and doing technical interviews if you are looking for a new job. Or it can be learning more TypeScript and Testing if you are looking to become a Senior Developer.

The Thing is what you are most afraid of.

It is what you should be doing instead of buying more online courses. Or starting new side-projects that are going to end up nowhere.

Do the thing. Keep on doing it. Succeed.

For example, in 2019 I was obsessed with writing. I bought tens of books about becoming a writer. I watched YouTube videos about writing. I bought online courses.

After months of doing that, I realized I didn’t get any better.

The catch?

I was doing everything but the thing: writing stuff.

Just like many of you I sometimes struggle with laziness and fear of failure. I postpone. I procrastinate and I find excuses. I avoid doing “the Thing”.

Yet, as I got older time taught me a valuable lesson.

The clock stops for nobody.

The juice of life goes to the people who do things instead of thinking about doing things.

Now, when I find myself procrastinating, I ask myself, what are you running away from? What is the thing you should be doing but you're not? Then, I jump in and I do that thing.

Get into the habit of doing “the Thing” whatever it might be. And your developer career will reach a whole new level.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2. If You Want To Take The Island, Burn The Ships.

The reason you give up so fast on your developer goals is because giving up is too easy. It is cheaper for you to fail than it is to succeed. Because there’s no penalty.

For example, let’s say you want to get a new, better job.

You realize you need to improve your technical interviewing skills. You decide to practice some Data Structures problems. The first days are fun, but by the end of the first week, you are already tired and quit.

You tell yourself, that getting a new job and making more money would be cool, but it can wait.

On top of that, you still have your job. You are safe. So why bother?

You drop Data Structures and move on with something else. And so your developer dream ends up in dust.

This is why, if you want to succeed, you need to burn your boats.

Have no escape route. When you have no option of turning back, you will turn forward and face the devil in the eyes. When failure is not an option, you will find unlimited willpower.

As Caesar and Hernán Cortés learned, no way out means 100% power moving forward.

To start theSeniorDev, Bogdan and I quit our highly paid developer jobs and lived off our savings for a full year.

We told ourselves that we either figured this out or burst in the process. The pressure pushed us to give our very best and to keep going despite the obstacles. We probably would not be alive by now if we had an easy way out.

You don’t have to be that extreme. And to be clear, I am not saying you should quit your developer job. That is a pretty stupid idea in the current economy.

But you do need to make it a lot harder for you to quit.

One way to do that can be to share your goals with your partner. Or commit to your friends to donate a big amount of money to a charity if you fail. Or find an accountability group.

Use the pain of embarrassment to make failure, not an option. It is only under pressure that we see how much we are capable of.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3. Never Negotiate With Yourself.

This one I stole from Kobe Bryant. If you want to reach the highest levels of your craft, you should never, ever, negotiate with yourself. Too many developers do that.

For example, you want to get better at unit testing and you set a goal to write a unit test every day for the next 30 days. The first 3 days everything goes okay, but on day 4, you are a bit tired.

You tell yourself tomorrow you will write 2 unit tests and catch up for today… Stop right there. You probably won’t do it! You are fooling yourself and you know it.

“I'm not negotiating with myself. I signed that contract with myself, I'm doing it.” - Kobe Bryant (Rest in peace, legend.)

Look, I can write tens of articles about the mindset of a Senior developer. But, in the end, there is no way for me to tell you how hard to work.

And if that’s the hardest you can do. When you are doing a great job or when you are bullshiting yourself? Only you know.

A hint to find out if you are negotiating with yourself is your brain coming up with an excuse as to why you should not do it.

Oh, my family was in town so I had to stay late for dinner. Oh, my best friend bought a video game and he wanted us to finish it together. My cat was sick so I had to take it to the doctor.

They are all excuses.

I am sure that if I held a gun to your head you would find someone to get the cat to the vet.

But, you negotiate it with yourself and then you find a legitimate excuse to quit. If you aspire to be a Senior Developer, you first have to behave like one.

Leave excuses at the door. And never negotiate with yourself again.

4. Turn Your Tragedy Into A Blessing.

I might get a lot of hate for this one. At this point, it doesn’t matter. Because the “victim culture” does no good to your success.

Is a great consolation. Sure. Yet, believing you are a victim of your circumstances will stop you from even trying to improve your condition.

I know the world is a very unfair place.

And it won’t change anytime soon.

Sometimes you do your best work and the promotion goes to another developer. Sometimes you do a great interview and never hear back from them again.

No matter how hard you work you can still lose.

But still.

You have way more power over your circumstances than you think. At least if you live in a Western country. Believing otherwise will stop you from even trying to improve your life.

I was born in rural Romania. Check the income level over there. Not as bad as in other places of the world, but not the land of opportunities either.

Looking for a better life, my parents emigrated to Spain when I was 14 years old. I had to emigrate again due to my developer career 7 years ago, this time to Germany.

Being considered a stranger everywhere you go is not easy. For a long time, I used to blame part of my problems on my background.

Oh, I didn’t get promoted because I am a foreigner. Or I don’t get the chance to talk in the meeting because of my last name.

This belief held me back for years. At one point, a mentor of mine heard me complaining and told me, "Dragos, if you want to succeed, you need to turn your tragedy into a blessing".

It got me thinking and that’s what I did. I turned all the negatives into positives. Sure. I didn’t start life in pole position, but that taught me the value of perseverance, hard work, and a positive attitude.

Suddenly, my tragedy became a blessing.

Arnold turned his tragedy, his Austrian accent into an asset. He was one of the few people who could portray the Terminator.

You might not have the privileges that others do. But if you are reading this, you are ambitious. You are probably passionate. And I bet you work hard.

Guess what, that’s more than enough to make it BIG in the software industry.

The fact that you have it harder than most people will make you enjoy success more. The underdog will always be happier than people who had it easier. Even if they achieve the same.

Victory just tastes better when is earned.

If you want to get to the next level as a developer, ditch the victim mentality, turn your tragedy into a blessing, and focus on the lessons you learned, not the bad stuff you went through.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

5. Make The Deadline Real.

In my 10+ years of writing code, I’ve had good times and bad times. Times when I would get everything done smoothly and progress. And times when nothing seemed to progress.

One day looking back at my journal I observed a weird pattern…

If I had forever to build an application, I would never finish it. But give me only a few hours and I will get more done than in months. The pressure was like magic, it got me in the zone.

Why?

Because of the power of deadlines. When I had a strict deadline I would get a lot more done. And I would do it faster. When I didn’t have a deadline, nothing would get done.

Sounds obvious. It is not.

I talk to dozens of developers every week.

They tell me about their goals. I always ask what the deadline is for those goals. Most times I will get a vague answer, like in a few months or, worse, nothing, I don’t have a deadline.

Try deadlines instead of motivation. It will work wonders.

My solution was to set a deadline for all my goals. All of them.

Nowadays I do it by instinct.

Make a habit that when you set a goal, put a deadline on it. This can be getting that new highly-paid developer job that you are dreaming of. Or having a promotion talk with your manager. Whatever it is, add a deadline to it.

This is it.

Put in place these 3 things and you will take your developer career to a whole new level. Don’t take my word for it. Try them out in the wild and see how they can change your life.

Until the next one,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

How To Get Developer Experience (Even If You Have None) 💡

Dragos Nedelcu — Thu, 18 Jan 2024 16:21:16 +0000

If you are a developer looking for a job, I bet you heard this already: "We moved forward with another candidate who has more experience."

Messages like this can literally break you.

They also put you in an impossible situation. If your problem was a fancy Data Structure, you could learn it. If it was a Design Pattern, you could study it. But, you can’t just snap your fingers and get more developer experience.

Trying to get a developer job as a developer without experience is almost impossible in this economy. That is because of the vicious cycle called “the experience trap”.

You can’t get technical interviews because you don’t have enough experience. You don’t have experience because you don’t get technical interviews. So you can’t find a job. It is a chicken and egg problem.

And the more Junior you are, the harder it is.

In 2024, the situation got even worse, with companies becoming even more demanding. With layoffs, recession, and AI, the job market became “Seniors only”, where experience is king.

The vicious cycle of Junior developers. Image Credits: Reddit.

How can you break this vicious cycle?

Should you follow traditional advice and do more courses or side projects? Should you lie on your CV?

Or should you wait 10 years and try again?

Most of you can’t wait 10 years as you probably need a job as soon as possible. And even if you could, you probably don’t want to.

You also know that no matter how many courses or side projects you do, most software companies won’t take that experience seriously.

And you might not want to lie in your CV.

First, lying is not the moral thing to do. Second, sooner or later you will be caught putting your reputation at risk.

Developers looking for a job in 2024. Image credits: Reddit.

In this article, I will show you how to get experience as a developer when you don’t have any.

If you are just starting as a developer or already at the Junior level, keep on reading. If you already have some experience, I will show you how to make the most out of it.

Knowing how to sell your developer experience will allow you to aim for positions that are much better than your current level.

For example, you might be a Mid/Level Developer who wants to give a shot at Senior level positions. This article will show you how to make the most out of your existing experience and stand out from the crowd.

Keep in mind, that I am talking about professional experience. The kind of stuff you can talk about in real-life technical interviews. Not random side projects that no one cares about.

Who am I to give you advice on this?

My name is Dragos, I am a self-taught JavaScript developer and in the last 3 years, I mentored over 250+ developers helping them move into Senior positions faster. I help ambitious developers get the recognition and salary they deserve. Read more about what we do here.

The first step to getting developer experience is to understand why and what kind of experience software companies are looking for in a developer in the first place.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Disclaimer: The Truth About Developer Experience (And Why Companies Are So Crazy About It)

You might think experience is the number of years you spend in a certain job. And to some extent, it is. But what matters more is what’s behind that number.

Experience is proof. Proof of expertise.

In the market, companies get paid to deliver value. Value means solving problems. Value means building software that solves a business problem. Those problems are usually not easy to solve. This is why people are willing to pay for a company to solve them.

Solving problems and building things is risky.

Even more risky if you do it for the first time. Things can go wrong. Timelines can be missed. Budgets can be exceeded. Risk is bad for business. Because risk is very expensive.

Companies want to minimize risk at all costs.

One way of minimizing risk is by hiring very skilled people. The more skilled the better. People who already built things like the ones you want to build in the past. Because they already walked that path, they know the shortcuts and the pitfalls.

Experienced people can anticipate blockers and failure points. In software development, this is even more important because things break all the time.

Think about it this way…

On the day of your wedding, you wouldn’t want the Junior hairdresser who just graduated to cut your hair. You would want a professional stylist. Even if you want the simplest haircut in the world, you don’t want to risk it. You would go for the experienced hairdresser.

When hiring, companies do the same.

Because they don’t want you to make mistakes with their money.

They want to pay for the mistakes you’ve made in the past and what you learned from them. Hence the current obsession with “years of experience” comes from.

The work experience companies are looking for is the result of making mistakes. And learning from them.

It is the result of having exposure to different tech stacks, scenarios, and situations when building software in the real world. Of applying theoretical knowledge in the real world and learning from the results.

Keep this in mind both when writing your CV and during technical interviews.

Even if you don’t have any experience writing code, or you have very little, you will want to portray whatever you have as professional experience.

Before We Start: Eliminate Limiting Beliefs

This is a mental block I see a lot of Junior developers having. They think, that just because they never had a developer job, they cannot consider themselves real developers.

They think they need an “official start” to their developer career.

Like a Bootcamp or a first job. When in fact they don’t even need such a thing. Because the moment you start writing code with the intent of getting a job, you are a developer. Even if nobody paid you for it yet, you are a developer, and you are coding professionally.

So leave the “I am not a real coder mindset at the door” pull up your sleeves and let’s help you solve this “years of experience problem”.

Now, there are a few different ways you can get developer experience when you have none. Let’s go through them, one by one:

1. First, Squeeze The Lemons You’ve Got

The first step is to pick whatever developer experience you have already and expand it. It doesn’t matter if is only a few months, weeks, or even days, you can and should leverage it as professional developer experience.

This can be an unpaid internship, a time you were helping your uncle with their WordPress site, or an official program, like a Bootcamp. They all count.

Not exactly what we are aiming here for, but interview experience is quite valuable by itself.

We are going to start with non-technical experience, experience you’ve got before learning how to code. Afterwards, we will move on with how the coding experience you’ve got so far.

1.2 Turn non-tech experience into tech experience

This is one step most self-taught developers miss. They think about their developer journey as a cut. And disqualify whatever experience they had before writing their first line of code. But if we are in the game of who has more experience, we have to squeeze that lemon, and we have to squeeze it hard.

What you want to do here, is to pick your last work experience and think of the part that involved interacting with a piece of software.

"When it comes to standing out as a developer, every bit of experience counts." - Dragos Nedelcu

For example, if you worked in sales before, you probably were adding data to a CRM. If you worked in logistics, you were using an ERP. If you were an analyst, you used Excel and Macros. And if you worked in marketing or UX design, I bet you touched basic HTML and CSS.

Now take that little piece of experience, even if it was only 3% of your job back then, and talk about that. Quantify it somehow, make it tangible, and mention the technologies used. Just like you would do with your coding experience.

Senior Dev Tip: you should use around 3 bullet points maximum in your CV for non-technical positions. If it is a 100% non-technical position, and you haven’t touched any technologies during that time, you might want to skip that experience completely.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

1.2 Turn Bootcamp Experience Into Professional Experience

The biggest mistake developers make with Bootcamp experience is that they consider it education and not work experience. When in fact, what they are getting in a Bootcamp is the closest thing to professional experience.

You have applications to build, together with a team of other developers under really strict deadlines. A Bootcamp is the closest you will get to writing code for a living!

So when adding it to your CV, don’t list it as education. Use the title of “Software Developer Trainee” or similar.

Jokes aside, talking too much about your Bootcamp, and in the wrong way, screams "Junior Developer".

Bootcamp graduates usually get a bad reputation. Work around it. Don’t talk about the Bootcamp. Talk about what you achieved during that time.

Second, quantify what you’ve done during the Bootcamp just like you would quantify professional work experience. Again, don’t talk about what you learned, talk about what you built.

How many applications have you delivered? How big were the teams you worked on? They might sound like silly things, but all these little details add up to a great developer CV.

1.3 If You Are Completely Self-taught

If you don’t have a Bootcamp and you’ve been learning how to code all by yourself, the same principles apply.

First, add yourself self-employed from the date you wrote your first line of code. Second, take a look at point #2 of this article.

There, I show you how to turn your self-study into professional experience. So it can catch the eyes of recruiters and get you that technical interview.

Senior Developer Tip: You might want to get rid of the Bootcamp in your CV. What Bootcamp experience does is that it adds a “cut” to your CV. Instead, extract what you were building in the Bootcamp and incorporate it into your “self-employed” experience.

2. Second, Fabricate Developer Experience Out Of Thin Air

Now that you’ve squeezed what you already have, it is time to add another layer of experience.

You will do that by leveraging all courses and side projects you’ve done to improve your course and packing them into a big snowball of experience.

The problem most developers make here, is once again, training learning activities as non-professional experiences. Wrong. We won’t talk about courses or side projects at all.

Not really magic, but properly quantifying your achievement and learning experiences.

We will talk about tangible outcomes that came out of those learning experiences.

2.1 How To Turn Online Courses Into Developer Experience

Online courses are probably the hardest to turn into "developer experience", particularly if you just list them in your CV.

Companies won’t take seriously things you learned on YouTube. Unless you present them in a proper way. In a tangible way.

For example, if a side project involved React Hooks, say, "used advanced React hooks to enhance performance and user experience on a high-traffic client-side application".

If it was an AWS course - "Deployed 6 different applications on the AWS Cloud, making them production-ready, leveraging different services such as AWS Lambda, S3 and EC2" etc.

Don’t tell me what you learned, show me the result of that learning.

Even if you haven’t learned much by doing a certain course, you can still use what you learned in your CV.

Another solution here is to move away from tutorial-like problems toward more project-oriented courses where there is some kind of result. Like a finished React application that you can deploy and show to people.

Make sure that what you are learning solves a real-life problem. And put that knowledge into practice.

2.2 Side-Projects: How To Sell Them Better

Side projects are a bit better than online courses for getting developer experience. Because they involve a lot more building and experimenting.

They still have a few problems though.

The code you write in a side project is usually much simpler than a production app. They are focused on building things from scratch and not so much on real production problems like testing, legacy code, scalability, and edge cases.

And lastly, employers hardly take side projects seriously.

Side projects are professional developer experience. But you need to present them in the right way. Image Credits: theSeniorDev.

Is like the tattoo artist who only tattooed on animal skin and never did a real body tattoo. I bet you don’t want to be the first human to paint on.

Same for companies and side projects. They don’t want to be your guinea pig. They need to see proof of mistakes and tangible outcomes in those side projects.

Just like with online courses, with side projects, the key is to make what you built as tangible as possible. The best part about side projects is that they are easier to quantify than online courses.

If you have built an image processing service with Node.js you can mention how many images it was able to process. If it was an e-commerce store with React, you could talk about the number of products or merchants it could handle.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

How To Pick Side-Projects To Work On

The more boring, the better. Think CRM versus crypto platform. The CRM is not fancy, but most companies use one. They will be able to relate to it when you bring it up in a technical interview.

It is crucial here that you don’t get distracted by “shiny” objects.

You don’t need more side projects. You need to sell the ones you have effectively.

Build something good enough to showcase. Don’t spend more than a few weeks on this. Most of your time should be spent on applying to jobs and doing interviews, not side projects.

Senior Dev Tip: Pick your 2 best side projects and turn them into professional experience. Polish them as much as you can. Make them production-ready. Deploy them to the Cloud and link them to a proper domain. Add some basic authentication. Populate the database if they use one. Fix any bugs you might find. Make a beautiful user interface.

Be careful, this can take you one day or it can take you 3 months. Do you have 3 months to spare? Probably not. The trick here is how you scope your side projects. To keep them small. You don’t need to build complex things to stand out as a developer. You need simple things done very well.

Note: don’t worry if your code is not perfect. If they ask you about it, you can always say you signed an NDA. Or that the project is still in stealth mode because they are raising money. If you know how to answer technical questions, people won’t dig in further.

2.3. Final step: put everything into a big bucket of experience.

Okay, so you extracted all kinds of tangible outcomes from courses and side projects. Now it is time to put them all together into one big job position.

Add yourself as self-employed and mention you were building applications for your small and medium businesses. Make up a name for your company and add all that experience there.

Magic. You now have created developer experience out of thin air!

There is a pitfall here. During interviews, some people will dig deep into that experience. You will be asked what your role was there. The technologies you used, and what the team looked like.

Unless you have a good story that you can stay behind here, you will most likely mess it up. For this last position, you want to write down all those details and ask those questions mentally and on paper before you do it live in front of a recruiter.

Senior Dev Tip: It is a good idea to build at least one of your side projects with friends or colleagues, so you can get team experience that you can talk about during a technical interview.

3. Third, Get Professional Developer Experience Very Quickly

Here you will need to find someone with a business idea, and, ideally, a bit of money, who needs a coder to make it happen. The easiest is to talk to your close friends. If not, you will need to find strangers who need coding problems solved. Don’t worry, there are plenty of them if you know where to look.

3.1 Ask Your Friends

If one of your friends has a small business, they probably need a website. If they already have a website, it might need some improvements.

They might also need CRM setup, some SEO work, and a booking flow. I am talking about yoga teachers, hairdressers, dieticians, and all kinds of consultants.

Offer to help them out for free in exchange for a reference. Quantify whatever you build for them as well as you and add it to your “self-employed” bucket.

3.2 Hang Around The Right Places

To find people who need help with their web projects, just hang around a co-working space for a few days or go to some entrepreneurship Meetups.

Entrepreneurs are always building something. Sooner or later you will meet someone with an idea who needs extra hands to help them build it. They don’t need to have raise capital yet.

Startups are great places to get developer experience fast. Just make sure you set the right expectations.

If they have a project that needs help, it is good enough. By helping them, you will not only get developer experience but also make some great contacts that will get you your next job.

Senior Dev Tip: Everyone is trying to build with AI these days, so even if you are a JavaScript developer it might help you to add some LLM skills to your profile. No need for 60hrs courses, just get familiar with how tools like ChatGPT are built and how to integrate them into your projects.

Senior Dev Tip: This is how I found my first web development project, by hanging out with entrepreneurs. There was always someone around who needed the help of a coder.

Senior Dev Tip: Do try to get paid for the gig you find, even if it is just a little. Money will keep you motivated and will show that you are adding value to the projects.

3.3 Use Online Market Places

If everything else fails, you can create a profile on freelancer marketplaces like Upwork or Fiverr, and try your luck there. I warn you, it won’t be easy to stand out.

You will be competing with millions of other people worldwide. Each freelancing platform has its own rules, and that is not the scope of this article.

Overall, use online platforms to supplement your experience but don’t count on them fully to build your developer career. Your past jobs, learning experiences, and local startup ecosystem are a much better place.

Senior Dev Tip: This is the option I like the least because it is probably the hardest. On these platforms, you will face insane competition at the international level. You will also interact with your customers in a faceless way, risk not getting paid, or simply wasting time. I would try it in parallel as you work on all the other ways I outlined above.

Conclusion

You might not have tens of years of developer experience yet, but if you follow all the steps I outlined in this article, you will, without a doubt stand out.

Key takeaways:

To stand out in the crowded developer job market, every bit of experience counts, technical and non-technical.
How you frame your experience is even more important than how much experience you have. Frame everything you’ve done as professional experience.
Turn side projects and online courses into valuable experiences by focusing on tangible outcomes and problem-solving skills.
Leverage your current network and local startup ecosystem to get experience fast.

Now that you have developer experience, it is time to write your developer CV and start doing some technical interviews.

Best of luck!

I will see you in the next one,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3 Programming Myths That Keep You Stuck, Frustrated And Underpaid 🔮

Dragos Nedelcu — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 12:45:44 +0000

What if I told you that the reason you feel stuck in your developer career has nothing to do with your technical skills?

It has nothing to do with Data Structures, System Design, or Software Architecture.

But it has everything to do with how you think about programming as a whole.

You see, ever since you started coding you’ve been conditioned to believe certain myths about being a developer that are ruining your career. It is why you suffer impostor syndrome and doubt your skills. Keeping you stuck at the same level, frustrated and underpaid.

What’s worse, these beliefs are so embedded in our everyday lives as developers, that we take them as a given. We don’t even question them. Because we think they are reality.

When in fact, they are just myths perpetuated by the community.

Myths that haven’t been debunked yet. Partly because they sound good, on paper. In reality, they are dangerous biases holding you back from getting out there and building the kind of future you deserve.

In this article, we will debunk those myths one by one.

So you can free yourself from limiting beliefs, take action on your most important goals, and unleash your full potential as a developer.

Let’s start with the first programming myth that’s keeping you stuck…

1. The Myth Of Passion

Great developers are extremely passionate, the myth of passion says. They code in the evenings, and they code on the weekends. At night, they dream in code.

Such passionate programmers can code endless hours without end. And they don’t even notice it. Because, of course, they are so passionate.

If you are not passionate enough to eat, sleep, code, and repeat, then you should pack your bags and find something else to do. My friend, being a developer is not for you.

Go find something else to do. I heard McDonald's is hiring…

What a bad message to send, particularly to fresh developers just starting.

The myth of passion is perpetuated by both developers and software companies.

First by developers who are trying to sell themselves and get ahead. In part by showing how passionate they are. I don’t blame them. We all do that in some way or another. All I am pointing out is the negative consequence of that behaviour.

And secondly, the myth of passion has been promoted by companies.

Passionate people are very good for business. Because they are willing to sell their time cheaply. They spend hundreds of hours in the office making someone else rich. Because they are so passionate about what they do.

What do they get back in exchange for those unpaid hours?

I guess an emotional connection with their job. A feeling of belonging. Appreciation and purpose. Those are really powerful drugs.

But, guess what… You don’t need to give your time for free to some company claiming to be a family to get those feelings.

Give your time to your real family instead. The one that doesn’t kick you out the moment you don’t churn enough lines of code.

Have a balanced life where coding doesn’t take most of your time.

Make friends and have hobbies besides work. You will get the same kind of fulfilment. Besides getting your time back!

The myth of passion is dangerous because it is another way of telling you that first, you are not enough (not passionate enough in this case).

‍“Programming isn’t a “passion” or a “talent” but a collection of acquired skills.”

Jacob Kaplan-Moss (co-creator of Django, Python Framework)

The reason the myth of passion is so dangerous is that it taps into your biggest fear as a developer, particularly if you are self-taught.

The fear that “you are not enough”.

The second underlying message of the myth of passion is that you don’t work hard enough.

This makes you push more and more, ignoring your health and family, leading to burnout. It is why some companies are such toxic places to work for.

In reality, the best software developers out there are very lazy. That is why they try to engineer things and be more efficient rather than throw brute force at a problem.

In my experience, one sign of a developer being a Senior is not having to code on the weekends.

Senior Developers choose consistency over passion.

Steady progress over bursts of productivity. They know “passion” comes and goes. And too much passion leads to burnout.

When the clock ticks the time, the experienced developer puts the break on passion. They close the laptop and get out of the office.

The funny part?

By moving away from coding for a while, they will come back the next day much more fresh and eager to get their hands dirty.

If you want to reach your full potential as a developer, forget the myth of passion.

Focus on balance and consistency instead. As someone who’s been coding for more than a decade now, I can tell you a developer career is a marathon.

Now on to the second myth that is holding programmers back…

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2. The Myth of Experience

How do you get to Senior Developer? How do you get to Tech lead? How do you get more responsibility or a pay raise?

Traditional advice will tell you there is no magic pill. You just need more experience. So hang in there. When your eyes are wrinkled and your back is hurting, you might get there. Or you might not. We don’t know for sure.

How reading developer job postings on LinkedIn makes you feel like. Image Credit: Reedit.

Although experience does matter, yet this myth is simply overused.

First of all, not all experience is created equal.

One can spend one year in a fast-paced startup and see it grow. Learning how to scale from a few hundred users to a few million.

Or spend one year maintaining some legacy enterprise software in a corporation. Learning little besides sending nicely formatted emails and office politics.

Note: The opposite can also happen. You learn nothing in the startup because the product never gets traction and you learn a lot in corporate because they already have the scale.

Experience expressed as years writing code is a poor indicator of developer Seniority. Time alone doesn’t translate to learning. It is what you do with that time that matters.

While there might be no magic pill for getting to Senior, there are patterns.

If a developer emulates those patterns, they can dramatically accelerate their growth. This is why you find developers with 3 years of experience making 6-figure salaries while some Senior devs are still struggling to pay bills at the end of the month.

This myth of experience is holding you back because the message is the same: you are not enough (in the shape of you don’t have enough).

Am I saying you can get ahead without experience? That you can get to Senior Developer without any of it?

No.

But don’t overestimate the value of time. What you should value instead is execution. The boat moves faster when you row than when you just wait for the current.

There are two main reasons for perpetuating the myth of experience.

Number 1. Lack of knowledge.

When you ask a Senior developer what it would take you to get to the next level, and they don’t know the exact technical and soft skills needed, they will simply defer to the years of experience and not look stupid.

Number 2. Insecurity.

If a Senior developer sees that you are trying to move faster than they did, the ugly part of the human spirit kicks in. Jealousy is very common in an industry that claims to be so open and friendly. Very smart people like software developers are usually very ambitious as well.

Software development is a very competitive industry.

We all collaborate and compete at the same time. And that’s okay as long as we make sure that competition is fair and don’t lie to ourselves saying otherwise.

The myth of experience is an unfair way of competition. Instead of looking at people’s talent and skills, we pay more attention to an arbitrary number on their CV.

That chicken and egg problem. Image Credits: theSeniorDev

To escape the experience myth, shift your focus. Be more worried about your skills than about the time you spend at a certain job.

If someone uses the argument of not having enough “years of experience” when you ask for something, don’t let them discourage you. Polish your CV and skills, start doing technical interviews, and let the market decide.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3. The Myth Of AI

It is 2024 and there is no point in your learning how to code. Or how to become a better developer. Soon, AI will replace all of us! The end of coding is near, so why bother at all?

The Myth Of AI has been around for a few decades. But it’s never been so present until the release of ChatGPT and Github Copilot.

So, why bother to become a better developer in the first place?

Software development was already very hard, and now you have the perfect excuse to drop it.

It won’t even be considered a failure. You can blame it on Open AI.

Not so fast.

I will give you two reasons why you should still bother.

The #1 reason to keep on coding is because of the “meta” skills you are learning. Those are the skills behind the skills.

When you are learning how to code you are learning how to think. To think in a structured way. You are learning how to model business requirements into step-by-step instructions. You are learning how to focus, how to filter information, and how to work in a team.

Even if machines themselves will do the implementation and coding soon, those “meta-skills” are highly valuable.

The #2 reason to keep crunching the keyboard is because from what we’ve seen so far, AI tools make many mistakes. They are prediction machines. They can’t think. Human reasoning is still in demand.

Will those AI tools get smarter?

Probably.

Will they replace humans in the near future? Probably not.

Guess what, if you replace reading paranoid articles about how AI will replace you with actually getting better at software development, you will most likely never get replaced.

Or, by the time that happens, you will already be retired on some exotic beach.

The old age analogy.

Imagine you are 50 years old. The machines won. They automated everything. But, you kept on learning, adapting, and learning new skills. Making good money, investing for old age. You are now pretty smart and already retired.

Let’s say instead that you gave into the AI paranoia going on right now. You gave up coding. You went and did something labeled as AI immune (don’t know if that exists, but construction jobs were top on the list).

You made some money but didn’t learn much and ruined your body in the meantime. You are now old and you want a desk job. Something remote ideally.

You have zero knowledge of how to make that happen. Your developer buddies who kept on coding are well off playing golf.

Giving into fear ruined your life.

Don’t give in fear. Don’t ever stop learning and improving.

Image Credits: theSeniorDev

Keep on getting better. Upskill across the stack. Get familiar with AI. In a matter of months, you will catch up and be so grateful you didn’t give up.

Why are these programming myths so effective?

Because they tap into one of your biggest fears as a developer.

The fear that you are not enough. Not enough to get that job. Not enough to get that pull request approved. Not enough to be a “real developer”.

Hopefully, after reading this article, you will be able to see those myths for what they are. Pure misconceptions that are holding you back.

Don’t give into fear and keep improving your skills.

Until the next one,

Dragos

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Build The Perfect Developer CV: 6 Mistakes To Avoid In 2024

Dragos Nedelcu — Thu, 04 Jan 2024 17:31:29 +0000

Have you applied to 500+ developer jobs and got no answer?

And when they do, the interview feels like an FBI interrogation?

Digging deep into your past and rooting for you to fail?

Let me tell you a secret…

The problem is not that the job market is bad. The job market is what it is. And dozens of developers are signing new job contracts as you are reading this.

The problem is your developer CV.

With recession, remote work and layoffs being so common, the stakes are even higher because you are competing with hundreds of other developers every day.

If your developer CV doesn't stand out, you are out.

And the worst part?

If your CV is mediocre, you won’t even get a chance to practice your skills in a technical interview.

At the same time, most developer CV guides out there focus too much on superficial aspects of your CV that don’t make a difference. Formatting, letter types and all kinds of irrelevant details.

Or they tell you to directly use AI to write your CV…

Sure smart ass, but so does every other developer with a ChatGPT account. So forget about standing out. AI can help you go faster, but not stand out from the crowd.

A great developer CV is a lot more than a list of buzzwords and job positions. It is a story of progression and growth. Read on to find out exactly how to craft one.

In this article, I will show you how to craft a developer CV that gets attention. With battle-tested tips that are proven to work in the real world.

I am not a guru, but I know what I am talking about. In the last three years I’ve written over 300+ developer CV’s. With many of them landing six figure jobs. And I did so overlooking every detail.

By the end of this article you will know exactly how to build a developer CV that will get you the job you are dreaming of. And allow you to live life on your own terms.

Let’s get going 🚀

Developer CV Building Principles

Before we dive into exact details on how to build a great developer CV, let’s make sure you understand the principles behind it.

Why principles?

Because, if you know the “Why” behind how we build your developer CV, you will be able to spot mistakes by yourself and make the right decisions without me looking over your shoulder.

Ignore these principles, and your CV will fall into the pile of thousands of other CVs that get ignored and tossed into the trash.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Principle #1: Experience Is King.

In the current economy, companies only want to pay for developers who are proven to deliver. And what’s the best proof you can get the job done? The fact that you already did deliver in the past.

This is the most important tip you have to remember all along.

Our main goal is to look as experienced as we can so we can stand out and have a shot at the technical interview.

Some developers get uncomfortable here…

Are you telling me I need to lie in my CV? Nope. All I am telling you is to get whatever good parts you have there and oversell the hell out of them.

Many tech jobs require unrealistic numbers of years of experience. If you are a Junior Developer this might scare you. Don’t worry we’ve all been there. You just have to put a bit more effort into your CV.

If you have professional experience

Squeeze that as much as you can. Quantify everything you did, connect it with the company mission and focus on tangible achievements.

Is not about the code you wrote. Is about the problem you solved and how it made the company money. In a tough economy that’s all that matters.

If you do this right, your next job will be a much higher pay and a better title. Rather than more of the same crap.

If you don’t have professional experience

Well, if you are just starting out, it gets a bit harder. But not impossible. You will have to fabricate some experience. Here you need to be creative and flexible.

Back up that experience with a very solid story. This might push you out of your comfort zone, but if you want a job, you really have no choice.

For example, if you only have some side projects, instead of listing them, merge them all together in one position. Pick the top 2 side projects that you like the most. Deploy them to production and quantify what you built just like you would do it in a real job.

Same with courses, certifications, or whatever you are doing.

The less experience you have, the more creative you will have to get in your CV. Read on to find how to do that without lying or making up stuff you have no idea about.

Present it in a professional way!

If you are a fresh bootcamp graduate, add the Bootcamp experience as professional experience, and list yourself as a Trainee. Take it out of the education sector.

Senior Dev Tip: How many bullet points per job position should you have? When working with our mentees I recommend at least 5 to 7 bullet points for a position in the last 5 years(regardless of the duration of the job).

Principle #2: Show, Don’t Tell.

Nobody believes what you say. Unless it is backed by proof. Well, maybe except your mom or dad, but they won’t hire you anytime soon.

You claim you are proficient in React?

How many React-based applications have you been working on? What were some other technologies you used? What was their traffic/impact?

Every piece of code you’ve written should have a quantifiable impact attached to it. I know you are a developer and your work doesn’t directly produce dollar bills. But it does so indirectly.

Testing reduces defects, which reduces time to market, which saves money.

Monitoring and logging allow the company to deliver on their SLA (Service Level Agreement) which increases user satisfaction and trust.

Even soft skills are quantifiable. Aligning non-technical stakeholders on the capabilities of your current tech stack actually speeds up the development process.

Companies hire software developers for two reasons only.

To make more money by building new stuff. Or, to save money by making existing stuff more efficient.

If you want to stand out, everything you write in your developer CV should fall into one of these categories. And it should be quantified in such a way.

Senior Dev Tip: Some tech companies might hire developers so the competition can’t hire them (read Meta and friends), but with the recession around the corner, that practice is less and less common.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Principle #3: Above All, Be Relevant.

You can have tens of years of experience. And you can quantify that experience in the most accurate way possible.

But, if it is not relevant for the position at hand, you won’t ever get called in for an interview.

Why? For the same reason why you don’t hire a brain surgeon for an investment banking position no matter how bright they are. Their skills are not relevant to the position.

The surgeon example might sound a bit extreme. In reality, relevance is not a binary criteria. The question is not, is your developer CV relevant to the position, but how relevant it is. It is a 5 over 10 or a 9 over 10. It better be a 10 over 10, but that’s not always possible.

Relevance is achieved first by research. Knowing exactly the kind of developer the companies you want to work for are looking to hire. And second by a change in mindset.

Image Credit: Daryl Watson

Despite everything you’ve been told, your developer CV is not an identical copy of your work experience.

It is only a snapshot of the work experience that is relevant to the job you are looking for. You cherry pick which part of your experience you want to showcase based on the market.

If your goal is a DevOps position, but you worked as fullstack before, you will want to pick whatever DevOps experience you have and talk mostly about that. Is a bit like politics I know, and developers hate politics.

To give your developer CV the best chance to stand out in this market, make sure it is as relevant as you can to the position you are applying for.

This does not mean you will write a new CV for each position you apply for. That will take too much time and energy. Read on to find out what to do instead.

Principle #4: Avoid Dumb Mistakes.

Now let’s talk about red flags. Those are things that no matter how great your developer CV is, will raise eyebrows and get you rejected.

They will bring in awkward questions and invite interviewers to dig deeper triggering their spider senses instead of giving them more confidence in the choice they are making.

Some of the most important are:

Short work experiences
Long employment gaps
Random jobs
Dates that don’t match
Title that don’t make sense
Typos

The most important mistakes here are typos and employment gaps.

For typos, make sure you use Grammarly.

For employment gaps, try to minimize them, by merging positions. If you freelanced for a different company every three months, merge those experiences into one.

Same with job titles and dates.

You want to merge those experiences. To tell a story of continuity and progression.

In reality there are going to be ups and downs, but the CV is not the place to reflect that. Your developer career should look like steady continuous progress towards a higher level.

If you did everything and you still have big gaps, make sure you have a good answer prepared as to why you have that gap in your CV. Good reasons can be things that pay into your personal development, like taking a sabbatical year to travel the world.

Senior Dev Tip: I advise you not to mention things like taking time between jobs to improve skills, even if very legit, it can make you look like a beginner.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Principle #5: Simple Always Wins.

Don’t overthink about the design of the CV. No one will hire you based on the font you used. Or the pretty formatting. You are a software developer, not a designer.

Keep it simple. Just like the code you write.

You can clone the template I provide later in this article, or pick the most simple one from the ones you have at hand. Avoid fancy at all costs. It is not about how pretty the CV is, but about how easy to read it is.

Principle #6: Quality And Quantity At The Same Time.

You’ve heard the old saying “finding a developer job is a numbers game”. If you apply to a few hundreds of jobs you will eventually get one.

This is very bad advice, because it is exactly what every other developer is doing out there. Every Week some developer comes into a call with me telling me about the hundreds of CVs they are sending without any answer complaining about the market.

Most times, they never stopped to fix the CV. And when they did, they just added a bunch of buzzwords without any consideration.

In the current developer job market, quantity matters as much as quality. Before you start applying to hundreds of jobs, make sure your developer CV looks at it’s best possible.

Note on using ChatGPT or AI CV Builders
I advise you to use ChatGPT for a first draft and for brainstorming. But, you should edit everything that ChatGPT generates.

If not, your CV will look machine written and won’t stand out from all the other ChatGPT generated CVs. You will notice how GPT tends to repeat itself and use cheesy words (like starting every freakin’ sentence with “spearheaded”).

Those ChatGPT generated CV’s be like. Image Credit: Reddit.

Regarding AI CV builders, from what I’ve seen so far, they have nice UIs built on top of ChatGPT.

I personally don’t like most of their templates.They restrict your freedom and add a lot of unnecessary elements (fancy design, picture, etc)

You are better off if you stick to a good Google Docs template, and use GPT to help you with the first optimization of the draft.

Writing Your Top-Notch Developer CV

Now that you know the principles you need to follow, let’s move on to the not-so-easy part, that is actually writing your developer CV.

There are 3 phases to building a great developer CV:

Research
Writing
Editing and Review

1. Research

Remember the “speak their language” principle? Your CV has to look like it’s been written for the job. At the same time, we don’t want to build a different CV for every job. That would be a major time sink.

The best is to follow the Pareto principle (80%, 20%). Your CV should match 80% of the job position requirements in terms of technologies and frameworks.

How do you find the 80%?

You research.

Use both Google and LinkedIn to look at positions you think could be a fit. Save the job requirements in a document. Do this for 15 to 20 positions. Now take a look at keywords that come up again and again.

This part is the basis of everything that comes after. So don’t skip over it, thinking you “already know”. You might be smart, but not smarter than the market.

Like Sun Tzu said:

"Every battle is won before it is ever fought." - Sun Tzu, The Art Of War

‍If you are a JavaScript Developer, you will see things like TypeScript, React and Node.js coming up again. Even stuff like Tailwind CSS and some AWS knowledge will be pretty common. Now you know for sure, that if you want your CV to even be considered, you will have to include all those things inside it.

*The best developer CV is built for the market as a whole, not for a specific company. *

Exception is when you are a frontend developer with a lot of full-stack knowledge and you want to give both positions a shot. In that case, I would build a fullstack CV and a frontend CV separately.

📝 Note: Now that you are in research mode, take a look at salary expectations, years of experience required, technical skills you don’t have yet, but come up again and again.

This kind of knowledge will help you plan your future learnings, but also to prepare during the technical interview. If you do your research well, writing the CV will be much easier.

Armed with all this market knowledge you can proceed to the second phase…

Senior Dev Tip: put aside around 3 to 5 hours for this task. Trust me, the more time you spend understanding the job market you operate in as a developer, the better your CV and your overall preparation will be.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2. Writing the CV

Now that we have the ingredients, we can start with the cooking. Time to start writing, but not before we get some things straight.

2.1 Don’t Get Distracted By Minor Things

It is normal at this stage for developers to get distracted by minor details. Stuff like formatting, dates, or any kind of triviality that doesn't have to do with relevant work experience (which is the only thing that actually matters for companies).

If you find yourself dwelling over minor details, remember, it doesn't really matter.

No company will ever hire a developer based on the fonts in their CV.

To make it easier for you, I recommend you clone the Free Optimized Developer CV Template we have here. It is based on everything we learned at theSeniorDev helping dozens of developers land six-figure Senior level jobs (click on make a copy once you get the Google drive document).

2.2 Get The Basics Out Of The Way

After you cloned the Developer CV Template, make sure you update all the basic information Add your job positions so far, change name, location, email and everything you see fit.

Double check these: contact data and dates of employment.

2.3 Where The Rubber Meets The Road: Work Experience

Once that is done, we are ready to start writing the bulk of your developer CV. That will mostly be your work experience. But, what can you do if you have no experience?

Simple. You fabricate it.

How?

This is a complex topic that I will write a full article about soon (if you want me to do it sooner than later, let me know in the comments).

To get experience quickly you should try to build something that is production ready as soon as possible. You could talk to one of your friends and see if they need a website. Even if it is a Wordpress blog, as long as the work ads value, is good enough.

You can also volunteer to help NGOs or any organization that needs a bit of support. Lastly, you could do side projects, but some side projects are too simple to talk about in a technical interview (and be taken seriously). So pick carefully.

Be as creative as you can here.

Don’t put any limits to your imagination. Remember:

"Desperate times call for desperate measures" - Hippocrates

For now, I will suppose you already have some experience to write about. Even if you only have six months of experience, trust me, that is a lot.

2.3.1 How To Structure Your Work Experience

The most important positions are the last ones, with your last work experience being the main focus. I want you to dedicate more of your time to that.

The first position in your developer CV should have at least 7 bullet points, 5 core technical contributions and 2 team contributions (can change depending on your experience level).

For the 5 technical bullet points, look back at what you were doing in your job.

Ask yourself: What were the technologies you used? What was the motivation behind building that specific feature or optimizing that piece of code? What was the impact of the stuff you built? How can you quantify it?

You don’t need to be able to answer all those questions for every bullet point. But answering at least one or two will make sure what you write in your CV makes sense.

Sometimes It can be incredibly hard to quantify the impact of a certain piece of code you wrote. That’s ok. All I am saying is try to do it and see what you come up with.

After you answer those questions you can start writing the bullet points in your CV.

To make it easier for you, at theSeniorDev.com we like to use the following format for the technical bullet points: “Achieved [X] as quantified by [Y] through doing [Z]”.

For the 2 remaining bullet points you will want to focus on soft skills and team skills.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Soft skills might seem silly to many developers, but they are very important for companies. Same as before, make sure you quantity your “soft skills” and relate them to business impact as much as you can.

Repeat this process for the remaining job positions in what is left of your developer CV. If the other jobs were not tech related, limit them to 1 to 3 bullet points and talk about them in a “tech related way” (mention the tech side of the job).

At this point the first version of your developer CV should be ready.

The rest of the CV will be an Education Section, a Technologies and Framework Section. I won’t go too deep into these ones as they are pretty straight forward. You can check the Free Developer CV Template here to see how to format them in the best way.

Finally, there is the Personal Section, which you should take advantage of to give the recruiter something to talk about during the interview (and show you are human). Keep it short.

Mention 2 to 3 hobbies you like to do in your free time. Even better if they are related to software engineering.

Now it is time for a final check before you start applying to jobs. Check for grammar errors using Grammarly and do a final review.

Time for Quality Assurance.

CV Quality Assurance: Red Flags To Look For 🚩

Regardless of how good your first draft is, there will always be mistakes in your first CV. This is why after the first write, you should leave the draft, and come back to it after a day or two.

Now you are ready to edit and spot mistakes. Here are the main red flags you should be looking out for.

CV Red Flag #1 - Lack of Focus

Some developers add more and more frameworks and libraries to their CV. This is either out of fear of not getting picked if they miss some. Or because they don’t want to miss out.

Yet, in the eyes of a recruiter or Senior developer, the more frameworks and libraries you add, the less of an expert you are.

I mean, do you really want me to believe that you are an expert in JavaScript, Python and Mobile Development after only 3 years of experience?

You might have worked with those technologies, but at a surface level.

Senior Developers (and recruiters) know that it takes around 5 to 7 years for someone to become proficient in a programming language or platform.

Limit yourself to one main technology if you have less than 3 years of experience. You can mention the other but don’t put emphasis on them.

CV Red Flag #2 - Employment Gaps

We’ve already talked about this one, but employment gaps in your developer CV will raise questions during the whole interview process.

You don’t want that.

If you have some gap between your bootcamp and the present moment, just say you were self-employed (aren’t we all) and add the bullet points from your side projects.

CV Red Flag #3 - Too Little Experience

A shortcut to look more experienced is to expand whatever experience you have with extra bullet points.

It doesn’t matter if you worked on something for 3 weeks, 3 months or 3 years. It doesn’t matter how small your contribution was. Maybe you were just extending some documentation or fixing small bugs. Make it visible.

When it comes to developer experience, you never have enough.

CV Red Flag #4 - Too Much Education

No matter how good your grades or the prestige of your school, focusing too much on your education can send the impression that you don’t have too much experience.

Lastly, there are a few more issues to watch out for. Here you can find a Complete Developer CV Checklist I’ve put together for you to use for a more detailed Q&A.

The End

Congratulations! You made it until here.

By now, assuming you've followed all the steps correctly, you've built a top-notch Developer CV and you are ready to start applying for jobs!

I will see you on the next one,

Dragos

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

5 Things Most Developers Learn Too Late ⌛

Dragos Nedelcu — Wed, 27 Dec 2023 16:50:49 +0000

When I look back at my developer career in the last 10 years, going from Junior to Senior level, to mentoring over 200+ developers helping them get to the next level…

And if I only had 10 minutes to share with you everything I learned…

I would boil it down to 5 core principles.

Five lessons that will dramatically accelerate your growth as a developer to the next level. Keep on reading because in this article I will give you 10 years of experience wrapped up in a few minutes.

Let’s start with number one…

1. Good Things Come To Those Who Persist

Here is a hard pill to swallow for most developers: despite all the magic tips and tricks you’ve been sold, a successful developer career is not built in a few days, weeks, or months.

It is built in years, even decades.

Reaching the top in any field, from sports to art, to software development will take you around a decade. That is 10 years, give or take assuming you do everything correctly (which most people don’t).

Most Software Developers don’t have that kind of long-term thinking when planning their careers. They just go with the flow.

Their careers are a series of ups and downs.

They either work 80 hours a week, trying to do everything at once and get burned out, or quit.

Or they do nothing and are stuck at the same level for years.

Their job might be average. Average is comfortable. So instead of doing something to change their situation, they get distracted.

They waste time binge-watching Netflix or get addicted to video games. Soon they find themselves stuck, with outdated skills or even worse, unemployed.

First 5 years of my career as a developer I suffered from the same vicious cycle.

I always when I would get my sh**t together. Wake up on time, learn something new daily, and improve my skills.

And times when I would crush and burn.

I would spend my weekends demotivated eating Cheetos looking for cheap dopamine shots. Like the latest RPG video game to sink my time into or a Netflix series to re-watch.

There is a problem with this vicious cycle.

The ups are awesome. But the downs are awful. Because they put everything at risk. If you burn out or your health is suffering, you risk quitting being a developer altogether.

*Senior Developers look for consistency over speed. *

Because when you manage the downsides, the upsides will come. Steady effort towards a goal beats inconsistency every single time. Small steps every day accumulate to a huge advantage down the road.

2. You Do You

In my first years working as a developer, I expected others to do things for me. I expected my boss to promote me. I expected my company to pay for training.

And when it wouldn’t happen I would blame everything but me

Oh, this company is such a shitty place to work for. Oh, my boss is so incompetent. He can’t even see the value I bring to the table.

Or, I would play the victim.

It’s because they don’t like me. It’s because I don’t have a CS degree. It is because I don’t speak the language/ I am an immigrant. Indeed, the world is not a perfect place. In fact, it can be very unfair.

But, no matter how hard you have it, falling into the victim culture won’t improve your condition.

It will give you an excuse and consolation. But, in the long term, it will disempower you.

Because when you focus on the things you cannot change (like your background), you just give away all your power to change your situation.

Taking responsibility for your life gives you the power to change it.

Telling yourself “Where I am in life right now, is all my doing” is something very hard to do. You can easily fall into blaming yourself. But this is not about blaming yourself.

It is about accepting that you have the power to change your circumstances. And you have no choice because no one is coming to save you.

In my case, instead of complaining about how I am underpaid and some other developer had it easier, I started thinking okay, what can I do to change that?

Can I switch jobs?

Can I learn some new skills?

I thought about solutions and execution. I went to conferences. I got mentors. I invested time and money in training. And I stopped comparing myself with anyone.

My life changed 180 degrees when I started looking at myself for solutions.

It is much easier to blame someone else for your life troubles. Taking ownership of one’s situation is one of the best things you can do for your career.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

3. To Get Golden Eggs, Don’t Kill The Goose

For most of my developer career, I worked long hours, did not do sports, and spent my evenings either playing video games or getting drunk and eating trash food at the pub with my fellow developers.

Coding all day meant I had a very sedentary lifestyle.

Being surrounded by candy and sweets and soda like many developers have access to in their offices did not help at all.

The result?

I looked and felt like trash all day round.

I never got enough rest. My energy levels were low so I would compensate with energy drinks which would make the whole thing even worse.

As developers, we sit on chairs, in front of computers for at least 8 hours a day. That’s a lot. And it is killing you. To be clear, I don’t care about how people look. But we are talking about your health. If you don’t take care of yourself, you won’t even enjoy the fruits of your work.

Make time to go to the gym. Twice or three times a week is enough. Control what you eat. For example, I know that if I buy something I am going to eat it. So I try not to buy any sugary stuff.

For a few years now I have been on a low-carb diet and it works wonders for me.

Taking care of yourself will improve your focus, productivity, and happiness. There is no way you can be happy when you feel sick.

Like Confucius said: "A healthy man wants a thousand things, a sick man only wants one."

One side note: taking care of yourself also means grooming yourself. A lot of developers think "ohh everything is so casual these days" so I can show up to the office or a Zoom call in my pajamas. Yes, you can, but it won’t help you get that promotion. Make sure you have personal hygiene in place.

4. Succeed By Design, Not By Accident

Many developers are not happy with the outcome they’ve got in their lives. That’s because most have what I call, opportunistic careers. Jumping from job to job hoping the next one will be better than the last.

And again, if you are in your first three years coding, that’s okay. Get some experience quickly and think about it later.

But you can’t build a career like that.

Some people do, they get lucky, but don’t assume you are those people.

Every day I jump on calls with developers asking them about their goals and vision for the future. And most of them don’t have one.

This is a pity because if you don’t know what you want, you will most likely end up with something you don’t like.

When you have a vision of where you want to go and plan, you can take action to get there. A vision is a guide for your life and career telling you whether the choices you make are good or not.

You might not achieve everything you set out to but, you will have a blueprint to follow. Which is a hell lot better than improvising. Life without a plan is like a race without a finish line, you are just running nowhere.

5. Think Small, Stay Small

It might sound cliche, I know. But, probably the most important thing I learned way too late in my career was to believe in myself and to dream BIG.

Maybe it was my background.

Maybe it was the lack of role models growing up.

But for a long time in my developer career, I stopped myself from thinking big. From really going for what I want.

Because deep inside I didn’t think I deserved it.

I remember one day writing in my diary that I wanted to get a 100k job. And deleting that line just after. Telling myself I was crazy and arrogant, and who would pay me that. I am just another developer I told to myself.

The biggest limit to my developer career was giving in to my inner demons.

The doubts and the self-limiting beliefs.

Everything changed when one of my friends, someone that I used to be pretty close with passed away. That moment I realize I will probably get a lot less time than I think in this world, and I better use it.

So I decided to try anyway because hey life is short and you don’t lose much by trying.

I tried thousands of things and most of them went wrong. But every small victory made me believe in myself a bit more, and a bit more. Until today, when I am here making this video for you. And still, I didn’t achieve everything I set out to.

But dreaming a bit bigger than just being a developer in a cubicle writing code was the first step for me to get there. If you are a developer that thinks they have more potential than they think they do, dream big because life is a lot shorter than you think.

Okay, now I have 3 things I want you to do.

I would like to know, what were in your case some lessons you wish you would have learned earlier in your developer career? Comment below :)
If you are an ambitious developer looking to level up and you are looking for a community of like-minded people, I invite you to join our free community of developers, click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.
Finally if you are a truly ambitious JavaScript developer looking to fast-track your career, and you would like my team to help you find out your technical gaps, build complete confidence in your skills, and fast-track to the Senior level through personalised mentorship, click on the link in the comments and apply for a chat with me.

Take care,

Dragos - CoFounder at theSeniorDev.com

Nail The Technical Interview In 2024: The Ultimate Guide 🚀

Dragos Nedelcu — Fri, 22 Dec 2023 16:44:13 +0000

Could you win a game if you don’t know the rules?

Probably not.

Sadly, most software developers today are trying just that.

Layoffs, recession, and inflation pushed many engineers back into the Technical Interview Game.

They have no choice but to play.

But most don’t even know its rules.

When they get rejected and ignored, they understand they are losing. But, they don’t understand WHY they are losing.

Or what it takes to win.

By winning I mean landing that high-paying developer job you've been looking for ever since you started coding.

I mean not worrying about mortgage payments anymore.

Or the kids' tuition.

At the same time, getting a developer job became a lot harder.

Layoffs, recession, remote work, and AI have flipped the power in the job market, from developers to companies. The days of knowing a bit of React and getting hired are gone.

Every developer job now has hundreds if not thousands of candidates waiting at the door.

You have no other choice but to stand out.

And you have to be very effective at doing technical interviews because the margin for error is small. With fewer opportunities coming by, you better nail the ones you’ve got.

If you are looking or planning to look for a developer job soon, keep on reading.

Today, we will dissect the Technical Interview Process.

You will find out the mistakes to avoid so you minimize rejections. And what it takes for you to succeed at each step of the technical interview process.

So you land that high-paying developer job you’ve been dreaming of.

Let’s go! 🚀

We will start by looking at the stages of a typical technical interview process. Sure, different companies have different processes but in most cases, they will look something like this:

Let's start with the first step.

That is getting technical interviews in the first place…

1. Applying to Jobs

The interview process doesn’t start when you get a phone call from a recruiter. It starts the moment you apply for a job or the moment someone sees your CV or LinkedIn profile.

That first impression of your CV will not only determine if you move on to the technical interview.

But also what kind of offer you will get if you pass the interview. And even then, the number of technical interviews you need to go through to get to an offer.

The more red flags in your CV, the more interviews to make sure you are a fit.

On top of that, the developer job market is right now oversaturated with talent. Blame the layoffs, the recession, and the economic conditions.

But competition is cut-throat.

You have to do everything you possibly can to stand out.

These days dozens of developers come into calls and tell me they can’t even get invitations to interviews. I always tell them it is probably their CV or their LinkedIn profile.

Building a great CV is not the point of this article, but I will give you some hints.

You are allowed to oversell a bit in your CV. The market is tough. You have to stand out. But don’t be like this guy.

Shallow work experience, that only talks about technical skills and doesn’t underline the impact you had on the company goals will get you rejected.

Employment gaps will get you rejected.

Side projects or work experiences that make you look Junior will get you rejected.

Fancy formatting, cool design, or buzzwords with no real evidence of expertise will also get you rejected. CVs written by ChatGPT with lengthy paragraphs that say nothing will get you rejected.

The good news is that if you stay away from common "red flags" and apply to jobs that match your CV, you will do okay for the most part.

If you want to know more about how to build a top-notch developer CV, watch this YouTube video where I go much more in-depth about everything.

Regarding your LinkedIn profile, it should mostly be a copy-paste from your CV with some additional tweaks (skills, endorsements & recommendations).

For now, I will assume you have a top-notch CV and LinkedIn profile so a few companies have contacted you willing to proceed.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

2.1 The Screening Call (First Interview)

This is where a recruiter from the company will call you on the phone. They will be asking you a bunch of standard questions about yourself and your CV.

Depending on your answers you will move to the technical interview or not.

What most developers don’t get right here, is that, during the screening call recruiters are not looking for a reason to move you forward.

They are looking for reasons NOT to give you the technical interview.

The screening call is a disqualification process.

I bet most recruiters are not that evil. Just doing their job. Give them a resume they will actually keep.

If you don’t sound like a match, recruiters will end the call quickly and move on with the next candidate. They have hundreds of them in the pipeline.

Look at it from the company's perspective. If you won't be a fit, why waste precious time that they could invest in other candidates?

Hiring statistics from a famous startup. See how most Developers don’t even get a first interview. From the ones that do, few move on to the technical interview.

So if you went through step #1 correctly and your CV and LinkedIn are solid, you don’t have to worry too much. You will only need to have a solid story to back that up.

Have A Solid Story For Your CV

The second tip here is to prepare and write down the most common screening call questions.

Don’t bet on improvisation and script them. The more you improvise during the call, the higher the chances you will screw up.

"Tell me about yourself" is one of the most asked questions in screening calls and first interviews. Make sure you prepare.

Remember, recruiters here are not looking for a reason to move you forward, they are looking for a reason NOT to do it. Don’t give them one.

To help you out, here are the top 5 questions you should have prepared:

Tell me a bit about yourself...
Why is there a gap in your CV?
Why are you leaving your current job?
Are you currently interviewing with other companies?
What are your salary expectations?

Answer these questions and write them down before your first screening call. You can use ChatGPT but I don’t recommend it. Practice the answers in the mirror a few times until they come off naturally.

Stating Your Salary Expectations

A crucial point you need to prepare for during screening calls is the salary expectations question. It will usually pop up at the end of the call.

Most developers either lack confidence when stating their range. Or they go over the top coming across as greedy and making themselves unhirable.

State your range with full confidence.

But, at the same time keep an open mind and see what they have to offer.

Don’t know what number you should ask for? Do a bit of research.

Most developers undersell themselves here. I would say a good range is usually 10 to 20 thousand on top of what you think you deserve, depending on the market you are in.

I wish stating salary expectations as a developer was that easy.

Also, ignore the old advice about not giving a number first.

Most recruiters know this trick and they will push you until they get a number. If you don’t give one they might end the interview and proceed with other candidates.

The reason why most developers don’t want to give a number is because they think it will limit their ability to negotiate later on. This is not true.

You can give a number and still negotiate when you get to the offer phase.

Once the company realizes that you are a fit, they will be a lot more open to talk about money. So don't obsess about numbers at this point.

Give a range that leaves both you and the company some space for negotiation.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Avoid Getting Ghosted Or Ignored

The best way to make sure they will come back to you after an interview is to check for commitment at the end of the call.

When they ask you "Do you have any questions?" say "Yes" and ask them when they are going to get back to you.

Get people to commit to getting back to you. Without being as mean as Walter White.

If they say "end of the week" or something longer than in the next 3 to 4 days, bad news. You might want to check out mentally of this process.

The call most likely didn’t go very well.

You can still probe further.

Simply say "Cool, is there any chance you can get back to me before that?". This will push them a bit and see where they stand. I leave it up to you how persistent you want to be.

Even if you push them, try to sound as cheerful and friendly as possible. It will disarm any misunderstandings.

The main point is don’t hang up the call and hope they will get back to you.

Because they probably won’t.

Hope is not a strategy. Get them to commit instead.

Senior Dev Tip: Technical questions might appear in the Screening Call. But they are usually high-level or frameworks-specific so don’t worry too much about them. You should be able to navigate them with relative ease.

Senior Dev Tip: If you are speaking on the phone, check your tone, intonation, and pronunciation. You want to sound upbeat and excited, the kind of developer they would love to work with. So if you had a hard day, take 2 minutes before the call to pump yourself up. Listen to your favorite song or take a few deep breaths. It will help you a ton.

Senior Dev Tip: Different types of recruiters have different goals. Prioritise internal recruiters, those that work for the company they are hiring for. External ones are consultants looking to place you. They sell developers to the highest bidder. Most times, these recruiters are just shopping around for candidates without a clear opportunity. They will waste your time.

Now that you have passed the screening call, you are ready to move on with the technical part of the interview…

2.2. Optional: Human Resources Interview

Depending on the company, there might be one extra step before you get to the technical interview. The HR interview that can come up after the screening call is optional.

You can think of it as a more in-depth Screening Call.

Here, the hiring manager or the engineering manager will try to break your CV. Be prepared for them to dig even deeper. And be prepared for some technical questions as well.

You might be asked questions about the frameworks you use and how they work. Something like "How do React hooks work?" in the case of a front-end developer.

Or if we are talking about a Senior developer interview, you might face questions about web performance or Microservices.

Again, don’t worry too much as the technical questions here will be high-level, but be prepared.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3. The Technical Interview

Now that you passed the screening call, comes the technical interview. Different companies have different processes, but they are usually made of the same basic steps.

This is where the real battle will be fought. Expect it to be hard, but not impossible.

Funny because it's true. Image Credit: the Internet.

The order might be different but here are the major types of technical interviews:

The Take-Home Challenge
The Automated Coding Interview
The Live Coding Interview
The System Design Interview

Let’s go through them one by one…

3.1. The Take Home Challenge

One of the most common technical interview types. You will be sent a bunch of requirements and need to build something to fulfill them.

In the front end, this will usually be a small single-page application. In the backend, it can be a simple REST API. Different companies have different processes.

Your #1 goal with Take-Home Challenges is to deliver the maximum quality in the minimum amount of time possible.

This is not easy as you don’t want to deliver bad code.

But, at the same time, you don’t want to invest too much time in one company.

When you get a Take Home Challenge don't be like Jim Carey and start coding right away.

Because no matter how good of a take-home challenge you make, there is no guarantee you will get to the next interview stage. Aim to strike the perfect balance between quality and speed.

Follow this checklist to make sure you deliver a great take-home challenge and get invited to the next interview.

3.1.1 Before you start building the take-home challenge

a. Make sure you understand the requirements fully.

If you don’t understand what they ask for, don’t assume something else and go build it. Stop.

Write an email to the recruiter and ask for clarification. This shows you take your time and think before you code.

A Senior Developer trait.

Ask clarifying questions and you will be safe from hearing something like "ohh we wanted something else" after you send your code over.

b. Make sure you get enough time to deliver something good.

The reality of take-home challenges is that a lot of companies will not respect your time. They will send you an assignment and expect the result 3 days later.

If you are employed or interviewing with other companies(which you should) such a tight deadline will put pressure on you and burn you out.

Don’t go ahead and code from the first minute. Negotiate.

Answer back, telling them that you can't deliver something in such a short time. Give an alternative and don’t start coding until they commit to it.

3.1.2 While building the take-home challenge

a. Leverage Boilerplate code strategically.

Don’t shy away from using pre-made repositories to go faster. If it is a React app, use Create React App, if it is a backend there are plenty of ready-made Node.js APIs.

Be careful and don’t pick complex boilerplate code that needs too many modifications to adapt it to the use case you need. You will end up losing more time than if you started from scratch.

b. Use ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot.

Sometimes feeding the requirements straight into ChatGPT and giving it a few instructions will be enough. Use it as it will make you much much faster.

3.1.3 After you built the take-home challenge

Check that you’ve met ALL the basic requirements mentioned in the take-home challenge. Do a quality assurance session.

You can use the following checklist:

1. The README
1.1. Does the project have a clear README?
1.2. With clear instructions on how to run the project?
1.3. With further improvements (what would you do if you had more time?)

2. Testing
You should include at least one test at every level
2.1 Unit Tests
2.2 Integration Tests
2.3 Optional: end-to-end Tests

Use ChatGPT and Copilot to go much faster here

3. Deployment
Deploy your project to a free provider like Netlify - you will not only stand out by showing the result and detecting possible errors.

4.Performance
Make a quick performance test to show you care more about than just delivering the feature.
4.1 In the Front End use a tool like Lighthouse.
4.2 In the backend, you can use something like ApacheBenchmark.

5.Presentation
Despite what you heard, developers don’t lie to read code. Get their attention by showing the end result first. Make a quick video with Loom walking through what you’ve built.

5.2 Explain how it works, show the main features, and then get into the code. Keep it light but show as much as you can.

As you can see this is a lot of work to do in only 10 to 15 hours. And if you are employed full-time, you might have even less time.

And with all this trouble you might still not get the job.

This is why, despite everything you’ve been told, take-home challenges are the worst kind of technical interviews for developers from a power-dynamic point of view.

To find out how to avoid companies ghosting you after sending the code challenge, keep on reading.

You are working for free, and have no power over the outcome which depends entirely on the company. Or worse, on luck.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

🎁 Bonus: Manage Your Expectations

With take-home challenges, you can still do all the right steps and still fail.

That's why you want to do as many challenges as you can and as fast as you can. So you don’t put all your eggs in one basket.

Follow the shoot-and-forget principle. Once you send your code over, forget about it. Apply to jobs, do other interviews, and get busy.

🎁 Bonus: How To Deal With Feedback

You can deliver the cleanest code known to humankind and still get feedback like "You missed optimising for performance and you didn't add Redux for state management".

When in fact Redux was not mentioned in the requirements and you did add it to the list of "things to do if I had more time" in the README.

But they didn’t look.

Or maybe they didn't care anyway.

They just had to come up with “feedback” so they could defend themselves against negative reviews on websites like Glassdoor… Maybe they found someone better and are trying to get rid of you.

Maybe they forgot.

Developers think that because they spent hours building something, the company will reciprocate with the same level of commitment.

In most cases, a random developer will take a few seconds to check your code.

If they see something they don’t understand or feel something is missing, they will discard it without thinking twice.

So when you get feedback after a take-home challenge you have two choices:

Ignore it and move on - the best way to conserve your energy.
Argue against it - this rarely works as companies will most likely entrench in their decision even harder. Most times it will backfire.

My advice?

Don’t argue with them and move on to the next company. Life is too short.

Do your best, yet be willing to walk away to the next opportunity if things don't work.

Senior Dev Tip: Before you commit to a code challenge, demand a review from them. Ask for commitment before you start working. If you are going to commit to delivering, they should at least commit to a fair review.

Senior Dev Tip: Develop a Stoic Mindset when interviewing. Let go of any expectations and attachment to the outcome. Do your best and move on quickly. There are plenty of companies out there willing to hire great developers like you.

🎁 Bonus: The truth about Take-Home Challenges

Because of the above reasons, take-home challenges are one of the worst interviews you can invest your time into.

I know you might think they are awesome because you hate live coding. And because you can do them from the comfort of your home at your own pace. With your own VS Code setup.

But, on the other hand, when you do take home challenges, you have absolutely no power.

‍You work for free on a project that can go nowhere.

For starters, your code gets reviewed and you are not in the room to explain your choices. Which is extremely unfair. This would rarely happen at work for example.

On top of that, no matter how much of a good take-home assignment you build, you have no guarantee that the company will come back to you with an answer. Or with feedback.

This is why, at theSeniorDev, we advise the developers we mentor to stay away from take-home challenges and get as good as they can at live coding interviews.

Senior Dev Tip: Depending on the number of interviews you are doing at the moment you might not want to do the take-home challenge at all. Or you might want to negotiate a compromise with the company.

Senior Dev Tip: If you sent a take-home challenge over and got no feedback, make sure you follow up after 3 or 4 days. Send a small email asking for updates. Keep it simple and leave formality at the door. You put a lot of effort into the challenge, you deserve an answer.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3.2 The Automated Coding Interview

The Automated Coding Interview is very similar to the live coding interview.

The difference is no one will be watching you. You will be invited to a platform like HackerRank where you will have access to a time-bounded algorithmic problem.

The good news is these interviews are less stressful as nobody is watching you.

The bad news is that the clock is still ticking. Most tools will also track your mouse, and desktop screen and won't allow you to copy and paste.

So what can you do to pass the automated coding interview?

Spending hours on Leetcode?

It works but getting good through trial and error will take you at least 6 to 12 months. Most developers don’t have that kind of time when it comes to finding a new job.

So, how do you get better?

First, understand that live coding interviews, automated or not, are a game of probability. It is not about passing them or not, it is about how close you get to the solution.

You will never pass every single code interview and if you do it is because you over-invested in those skills and neglected others.

On top of that, I know developers who are top 1% on Leetcode and still can’t get a job. Because they lack the System Design skills or they can’t sell themselves effectively.

Sad but true. No matter how good you are at crunching Algo problems, it won’t get you the job.

As a Senior Developer, you should aim to pass around 80% of the live coding interviews coming your way and forget the 20% left.

So what can you do to get better at passing live coding interviews?

Step-by-step Instructions:

Number 1 - Get insanely good at breaking down logical real-life problems into control flow structures (like for and while loops). You should be a master at writing pseudo code and touch type to at least 60 WPM. If you are not there, start now.

Number 2 - Master fundamental algorithmic patterns. You should understand recursion and how to think recursively. How a queue and a stack work. And how to translate "while" and "for" loops to recursive functions (and back and forth, see number 1).

Number 3 - Get familiar with the Web API. There are certain patterns that we see always in job interviews like using the Promise Constructor, understanding how Timer Functions work (setTimeout), and how they interact with the Call Stack. And knowing certain Array methods (map, reduce, forEach… you must be able to write those on top of your head).

Senior Dev Tip: You should know basic sorting algorithms like Binary Search and Frequency Sort. They will come in very handy in any algorithmic interview.

Senior Dev Tip: You should be able to touch type and write "for" and "while" loops with the speed of light. Just joking, but it helps.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

3.3 The Live Coding Interview

This one is very similar to the Automated Coding Interview, with the difference that someone will be in the room looking at you as you code and asking questions.

During live coding, most developers get nervous and mess it up.

Again, it is funny because it is true. Image Credit Reddit.

The main thing you can do to succeed in live coding interviews is to change your mindset. Aim to have the same attitude as when you are pair programming a close friend.

You are both as chill as possible, collaborating, focused on fixing the problem and communicating all the time.

Step-by-step Instructions For Live Coding Interviews

Number 1. Think out loud

Make your intentions clear. "So if I get this right, I will try to solve it like this. So I am to implement a nested loop and see where we get from there."

Be prepared for dismissive, passive-aggressive, competitive, and demotivated interviewees.

Don’t let their emotions mess up with yours. Focus on the problem at hand and stay professional at all times. Expect things to go wrong and stay cool regardless.

Number 2. The Performance Talk

Here is where Big O notation comes into play. No need to be an expert but be able to estimate the performance of a recursion call or a pair of nested loops.

Senior Dev Tip: take your time. Don’t jump into the code. Don’t rush to the solution. Breathe and let your brain do the work step by step.

3.4. The System Design Interview

The System Design Interview is one of the hardest interviews because it is a measure of your technical breadth as an engineer but also your technical depth.

But, how can you pass it if you don’t have 20 years of experience writing code?

Simple. Play at home.

You lead the System Design interview to the part of the stack you are most comfortable with. This means you should propose the next step and align it with what you know.

Collaborate with the interviewer but drive the discussion to where you can excel.

Any developer can relate.

For example, if you are talking about Microservices and are good at Database Design, send hints in that direction "So, do you want to talk more about the database now?"

The biggest pitfalls here are:

1. Running out of things to say
2. Being passive, only answering questions, not asking

You can deal with both if you stay focused on the problem at hand and try to relate it with what you know as much as you can, instead of pretending you know things you don’t.

3.4.1 System Design In the Backend

In the backend, it will most likely start with the Fundamentals, which will probably be REST APIS. Then you move on to Authentication and Microservices.

And then depending on how deep you can get, you go into topics like Load Balancing, Caching, Autoscaling, and Service discovery. Here is where they will grade how Senior you are.

Here it is important to always take into account the complete software lifecycle. That means deployment, logging, and monitoring.

A developer that will mention things like SLA and SLI will for sure stand out here. This is very deep. If you want me to write a full article about this, let me know in the comments.

3.4.2 System Design in the Frontend

In the front end, the System Design Interview will most likely focus on a piece of complex UI.

Like a social media newsfeed (for example: build the Instagram feed).

Or a complex form with client-side validation.

The key here is to be able to break down complex requirements into a UI(wireframing) and understand common UI/UX patterns like pagination or infinite scroll. Topics like state management in a huge application, or how client-side routing works will come in handy as well.

The biggest difference between a Senior and a Mid/Junior Engineer here will be the Scalability and Web Performance discussion.

A Senior Developer will be able to dive deep into topics like lazy loading, code splitting, optimistic UI, and scalability strategies like using a CDN, caching, or server-side rendering.

Seniors understand topics like polyfilling, tree shaking, and content negotiation and they can put them all together into a coherent story about how the System will look like.

As side topics, make sure you look into how to build a design system, managing CSS as scale(think BEM or CSS in JS) and micro-frontends. Now that you are there, take a look at Monorepos as well.

Does it look like a lot?

It is.

Keep in mind this article is about how to nail the Technical Interview up to the Senior level. The interviews you will do in real life might be as hard or a bit harder than this if you are lucky. Either way, preparation is key.

A Senior Developer I worked with used to say, only the paranoid survive. True during layoffs and true during a job interview (I would replace paranoid by well prepared though).

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Senior Dev Tip: Even if it is a Senior-level interview, you can expect interview questions about fundamental JavaScript, such as "How does the Event Loop work under the hood?" or, "Can you tell me what happens to TypeScript code when it is transpiled? What gets shipped to the browser?" Make sure you prepare them.

Senior Dev Tip (Frontend): Do understand the basics and best practices when it comes to accessibility. It is one of the most underlooked topics by developers but you should expect a question in at least 70% of the interview.

Also, make sure you check out Semantic HTML, how to include Accessibility in your dev tools (ESLint Plugins), and what things like “area-label” are. These are the kind of details that will make you stand out from the mass of coders.

Congratulations!

If you made it this far, you passed the hardest part of the technical interview and you are ahead of 99% of your competition.

4. Optional: Hiring Manager Interview

This is simply an extension of the Hiring Manager Interview but with a strong focus on behavioral questions. To put it simply, they want to know that you can work well in a team.

That you can face and solve conflicts productively (more on that later) and that you can prove and demonstrate a go-getter attitude.

Companies are biased toward hiring people with the right attitude.

That is a mix of positivity, professionalism, and proactivity. They will ask you questions like "Tell me about a time when you had a conflict in your dev team and how did you go about it?" or "Tell me about a project that you are most proud of?".

Or, my favorite, "Tell me about one of your biggest failures or a project that failed."

It is important here that you stay positive and professional, but at the same time tell real stories that people can relate to. If you have no stories or you improvise you will come across as inexperienced, or worse, unprepared.

If you sugar-coat it too much it will sound fake.

If you script them too much you will sound like a robot and there is already ChatGPT for that. So try to do your best with the storytelling but keep it real.

5. The Culture Fit Interview

If you get here, you are doing great. The company is confident in your technical skills. Now they want to make sure you will fit into the company and the team.

To nail this interview you need to show 2 things:

Overall Professionalism
Excitement about the company

This interview might feel cheesy and unnecessary, but is part of the process.

Culture fit interviews feelin’ like.

Jokes aside, let’s dive deep into these two traits and how you can display them during the interview:

1. Professionalism

You want to show that you have good conduct and can handle difficult situations. Trust me, there will be many as building software is a very messy process.

How do you handle conflict? How do you take feedback? Are you a good team player? If so, what’s the last thing you did for your team to help them achieve their goals?

In this interview, words are worth nothing.

As always, it is all about proof.

To nail the culture fit interview, use stories from your past experiences. Talk about the situation, the action you took, and the result. Use the STAR format. Feel free to Google it if you don’t know what it is.

Don’t memorise but do write down the answers before the interview.

This is one place where you can use ChatGPT to help you out. Don’t worry if the answer sounds a bit cheesy or robotic, as long as you can make a point is okay.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

Remember, you are a software engineer, not a literature major.

Here are the top 3 questions for you to prepare:

How do you handle disagreements? For example in a code review.
Tell me about a time when you identified a critical bug in the codebase... How did you go about it?
Give me an example of when you missed an important deadline… What have you done about it and how did it go?

2. Interest and excitement

This means you are enthusiastic about joining the company. You should be. If you have to fake it, go find another company that will get you excited. Life is too short.

Being excited doesn't mean you are their biggest fan. It means that you understand their mission, vision, and values. And you want to help them make that vision a reality.

Before the culture fit interview:

Check the company’s mission and vision statement
Think about how you could help them advance with that

Now that you have your STAR format questions prepared and you know the values and the mission of the company you are more prepared than 99% of developers out there.

One last thing, before jumping into the call, make sure you are in a good mood.

Play some funny videos on YouTube or listen to your favorite song. Emotions are contagious. And people gravitate towards good emotions. So get yourself in a great mood before you jump into the interview.

Senior Dev Tip: Listen more than you talk. Remember, it is about them, not about you. Ask questions about the vision and mission. Ask them what’s their biggest challenge right now. Ask why. Simply show you care and the job will be yours in no time.

Senior Dev Tip: You might think, what a bunch of corporate BS this is. Why do I have to “fake” all this stuff? I just want to open my editor and write some code. Well, it is what it is and you have to deal with it. And yes, some of these interviews will sound like plain corporate politics and propaganda. Is not good, is not bad, it is what it is. You need the job, so just do it.

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

6. Offer Negotiation

Okay, so you passed all the previous stages and you’ve got a magic email from the company saying that they would like to extend you an offer.

They might invite you to a Zoom or a telephone call to tell you about it.

If you jump on a call, always opt for a phone call. Or a Zoom call without video.

Okay, you might not want to be that direct, but you’ve got the message.

Audio-only calls put a lot less pressure on you. You can also make longer pauses to think and take notes. (if they push you, just say you are on the go and can’t do video at the moment).

Two Objectives During Offer Negotiation

Listen to what they have to offer - Take notes. Ask questions if something is not clear.
See if what they offer you is the best they can do - Say something like: "Hey, great offer. Is this the best you can do on the base compensation side? Or is there some margin?"

Senior Dev Policy: Never commit during a call

Even if you love the offer, the best is not to commit right on the spot. No matter how hard they push. Just say you took notes of everything and need to think about it and come back to them.

They might try to push you and see if this is good enough.

Tell the truth.

If you like the offer and find it attractive, tell them, yes it is a very solid offer.

If not, tell them it is a solid offer, but you feel like [insert your number] would be a bit more competitive in the current market.

Work with the recruiter, state your wishes, and see if they can do anything about it.

Things to negotiate for as a developer ranked by importance:

Total Cash Compensation - push up on this one as much as you can.
Bonus - signup bonus, yearly bonus, whatever. It is free cash.
Remote Work - go for fully remote or as many remote days as you can.
Vacation Days - paid time off, highly valuable as well.
Learning Budget - make sure you get a commitment on this one, written if possible.
Equity and Stock options - can’t pay the mortgage with these, but they help.

Senior Dev Tip: they might try to talk about benefits, tangible or intangible. Like a learning budget or the chance to work with new technologies. Take note, but don’t get distracted. Move the conversation back to the cash compensation which is the most important.

This is not a deep dive into developer salaries and compensation, but let’s say the most valuable things are things you turn into cash quickly.

Like cash itself, bonuses, or a learning budget.

Holidays are great as well as they have a direct impact on your health and time with your loved ones.

You can’t pay your mortgage with stock options. The likelihood of those options becoming real cash is low, and you always have the vesting period.

Games companies play at the offer stage:

Giving you "feedback" before they make the offer
Mentioning other very strong candidates
Talking about "budget" limits

The truth is, no matter what they say, if you get here, the power is in your hands.

If you have another company extending you an offer, that is even more true. So don’t give in. Try to push them. Don’t be mean, but don’t be nice either.

This is it.

Now that you understand the rules of the technical interview game, you can adjust your strategy and actions and have the best chance to win. To get the kind of offer you deserve.

Remember, play to win!

One last word…

I know you might be thinking this is too much work.

I agree.

Technical Interviews are a lot of work. However, being able to pass technical interviews is a highly paid skill.

It will give you access to a lifetime of financial stability, allow you to switch jobs freely without the fear of not finding something better, and get you a job you love.

Getting good at passing technical interviews is hard.

But it is worth it.

I wish you the best of success in your next interview.

Take care,

-Dragos, Founder at theSeniorDev

🚨P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to the Senior level with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy.🚨

12 Senior Developer Traits Juniors Need To Master 🔥

Dragos Nedelcu — Wed, 13 Dec 2023 15:38:11 +0000

The fastest way to get to the top in any field, whether it is arts, sports or software development is to study the people that are already at the top… And do what they are doing that you are not.

If you write code for a living, this means taking a look at Senior Developers. It means identifying what skills, habits, and traits they possess that you don’t.

After spending thousands of hours in the last 3 years working with top-notch Software Engineers worldwide, I found out that there are 12 Senior Developer traits that you can put in place right now to fast-track your growth to the next level.

Let’s start with number one…

1. Focus

Focus means saying no to some things, so we can do others.

Ideally, saying no to the things that don’t matter. And saying yes to the stuff that makes a difference. The stuff that moves the boat faster.

This is really hard for many developers because it goes against our natural instinct. It means accepting that you can’t do everything. And that not every opportunity is created equal.

You can’t learn every new framework out there. You can’t read every newsletter. You can’t attend every conference. And you don’t have to.

Your time is limited. So is your energy.

Being a Senior Developer means picking your battles.

“People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.” - Steve Jobs

Funny enough, the better you can pick, the faster you will progress. Senior Developers have the same 24 hours in the day that you have. But they get more done.

How?

By doing less.

When a new thing comes your way, ask yourself "Does this really matter?" Or is it just another trend? Chances are it is just another distraction disguised as an opportunity.

Senior Developers say more no’s than yeses. They finish more projects than they start. And they master the framework they already work with, before learning a new one. If you want to get to Senior faster, the first trait you need to develop is focus.

2. Second Order Thinking

One thing that screams "Junior dev" is the attitude of "let’s build it and we will find out". Juniors have a bias for coding first and thinking second.

That can be a good attitude if you are just starting out, but when you are working on production-ready software, some technical decisions you won’t be able to change. Or change easily.

For example, you choose Vue as a front-end framework.

Then, requirements change. You start thinking React would be a better option. Sure, you can switch to React. But it will be neither easy nor cheap.

Senior Developers know it is easy to get high on your own supply. But if you fall in love with the frameworks and libraries you know best, you will start making poor technical decisions.

They think twice about the consequences of their choices. This can mean asking the “five whys” when trying to understand a problem.

Or thinking about the possible drawbacks their solution could have.

For example, now that we have added Redux, global state might be a bit easier to manage. But we will have to onboard new developers on Redux. The learning curve is high.

And, guess what, our JavaScript bundle will get bigger which is not good for performance.

Considering second-order circumstances will make you a much better developer. It will also help you during technical interviews.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

3. Pragmatism

When Junior Developers read a book on best practices, they jump and try to apply them to every line of code in any release. They follow them religiously.

If you can't make technical decisions by yourself, it is much easier to stick to predefined rules. But software development is not a religion.

A good example is Testing.

When a Junior dev reads about TDD (Test Driven Development), they will start trying to test everything. Aiming for full code coverage. When in fact, complete code coverage gives diminishing results and will turn out to be a waste of time.

Senior Devs know how to balance best practices and time to market. When to take shortcuts and when not to.

Hacking things quickly will generate bugs and technical debt. Always sticking by the rules when the context of your code changes will result in bad decisions.

You need a balance.

Be open to reconsidering your technical choices based on circumstances.

4. Nothing To Prove

Because of lack of confidence, Junior devs find themselves constantly trying to prove themselves to others. Same with Senior developers who are insecure about their value and skills.

They base their confidence on the validation they receive from others.

This is a losing game.

They will try to show how much they know in a certain technical discussion, talking over others, or pushing code late at night or over the weekend.

In reality, all these behaviors create a toxic team environment and backfire. In the best case, they will make you look less Senior than you actually are.

The Cheetah doesn’t have to prove itself in the race, it only runs to hunt.

There are two ways to deal with this.

The first one is to stop spending so much on external validation. Because the truth is you don’t need to prove yourself to anyone. Only to yourself.

The second is making peace with the negative voices in your head.

You can be your worst critic. Perfectionism, fear of failure, and a mistaken idea of what a "real" developer is are destroying your self-esteem. That’s why no matter how hard you work you always feel like falling short.

It’s time to get out of your head.

Focus on mastering your craft and the rest will follow. You will instantly become more confident in yourself and your skills. And you will stop trying to prove yourself to strangers.

5. Master The Fundamentals

Whenever I bump into a LinkedIn profile of a developer and they describe themselves as a "React" developer, or an "Angular" developer, I know they are not Senior. They might be Senior in that framework, but not Senior overall.

A Framework developer will never be a Senior Developer.

Frameworks don’t make you Senior because frameworks are only the icing on the cake. Not the cake itself. The tip of the iceberg, versus its bottom.

I would even speculate that behind the current epidemic of Impostor Syndrome among software developers, even Senior ones is not a lack of talent or lack of hard work.

It is weak fundamentals.

This is also why topics like debugging or performance optimization are a guessing game for most developers. They are not used to digging below the surface of the libraries and tools they are working with.

To become a Senior Developer you must not only understand the “What” but also the “Why” behind things.

A Senior developer would, for example, not only be able to build a React application. But they would also understand why React has been built in a certain way. And how it blends with the language it’s been written in (JavaScript/TypeScript) and the platform it runs on (the Web Browser).

The good news is that once you get the fundamentals handled, the level of everything will rise.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

6. Deliver End-to-end

The #1 reason why companies avoid Junior developers is that they need a lot of external help to get things done. External help means you will be bothering a Senior developer to get your stuff done.

Junior developers are considered “expensive” because they can’t deliver independently.

Instead, Senior developers can deliver end-to-end. Give them a bunch of requirements and they will figure out the rest. This doesn’t mean they are lone wolves, they are usually great at working in a team.

It doesn't mean Senior devs hack things quickly just to push them forward.

That’s not a “real” Senior.

And it doesn’t mean that they know every part of the software development lifecycle in depth.

But, Senior developers understand all the major pieces across the software development life cycle. And can contribute to each of them (frontend, backend, deployment).

If you are a Junior/Mid developer looking to level up, end-to-end delivery is one trait you need to put your eyes on.

7. Mental Models

One of the main things that sets Senior devs apart from more Junior ones is the amount of complexity they can handle.

Seniors can understand more complex codebases and requirements.

They can understand second-order circumstances. How changes in the codebase will affect performance, costs, and even the team.

And they do that not because they memorise every implementation detail. That's impossible because human memory is very limited.

They do that because they abstract the complexity of the code into mental models. These are simple ways of representing reality.

How can developers build quality Mental Models?

By looking behind frameworks and libraries and learning the design patterns behind them. There is a lot of noise out there depending on your tech stack. Things like SOLID principles, or MVC…

But I think the best way to start is by picking whatever framework you are working with and trying to look beyond the code.

Start asking yourself, why did the creators of the framework build it this way? Is it built on new concepts or is it just an implementation of age-old principles (which is usually the case)?

By answering these questions you will build your mental models on software development, and be able to handle more complexity. That’s one of the most effective ways to fast-track your growth to Senior Developer.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

8. Senior Developers Control The Story

One thing Senior Developers can do extremely well is lead technical discussions and influence other people around them. Be it business stakeholders, product managers or fellow developers, Senior devs know how to guide them in the right direction.

They do this using a mix of assertiveness, technical expertise, and communication skills.

Senior developers are also able to set strong boundaries.

They can disagree without getting emotional. They can stand up for themselves (and others) during meetings. They negotiate their salary aggressively.

And they tell their own story.

Senior Developers know how and when to draft a line in the sand and say "enough is enough".

If another developer starts blaming others during a code review, Seniors know how to stop them. If higher management tries to get into a developer’s work and micromanage, Seniors know how to push them back without damaging the relationship.

There is no step-by-step guide on how to become more assertive as a developer.

It takes repetition and practice. The first step is to stop saying “Yes” all the time. And to start trying to get your way in salary negotiations.

9. Long Term Thinking

Junior developers think for “now”. They think short term. That is true for their code when they take shortcuts. A Junior Developer will extend a piece of code without thinking about refactoring it properly or simply ignore testing and performance.

But Juniors also think short term about their careers.

This can mean job hopping too much or burning bridges. It can mean neglect.

Like not improving your skills or the way you sell yourself because right now your job is stable. Just to regret it six months later after getting laid off.

Part of becoming a more Senior developer is starting to think long-term.

The first way to do that is by changing your mindset. Most short-term thinking that Junior devs have is not caused by laziness but by self-doubt.

Deep inside they are still thinking whether being a developer is the right thing for them. Or whether they picked the right career.

These doubts stop them from committing long-term.

Good things take time, Senior developers know this and adjust their thinking accordingly.

And now with AI threatening the end of software development, this short-term thinking is more frequent than ever. Why commit to something anyway if it is going to be gone soon?

Trust me on this, it is only when I made a full commitment to my career as a developer that things started to take off.

I said, “this is it”.

I stopped looking outside. I told myself: this is my job now and it will be my job for the next decade so let me do it well.

I started investing in my skills because now I know they will pay off.

Even if you are not going to write code for the next 20 years, having a long-term mindset will bring you great benefits. Senior developers got to Senior level because they committed to their craft. If you aspire to get there, you should do the same.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

10. Excellence Is A Habit

I think it was Kent Beck who said the famous phrase "I am not a great programmer, just a good programmer with great habits". Habits are important because they stand the test of time.

Because any kind of knowledge you have about a JavaScript framework will sooner or later become obsolete. Technology changes. But your habits will stay with you forever.

The good news is that humans are creatures of habit.

It is not easy to set new routines in our brains.

But once we interiorise them as habits, we have an easy time following through. The best way to take advantage of this is to get whatever goal you have and break it into daily actions. Then turn those actions into habits through repetition.

For example, if you want to get better at testing, write one unit test every day.

If you want to be more prepared in the daily meeting, and think clearly, keep a journal. If you want to find a new developer job, and you have to send 100 applications, send 10 applications every day.

Set up new habits and your progress towards the Senior level will be constant and steady.

11. Protect Your Most Important Asset

Being a Senior Developer means thinking long-term not only about your code and technical decisions but also about your health.

Because health is wealth.

I talk about this again and again in my videos.

Developer jobs are extremely sedentary. You spend most of your day sitting in a chair in front of a computer. That is very bad for your health.

Then, there is all the trash food, like chips, soda, and candy in the office. This means unless you make a conscious effort, it will be hard for you to stay healthy and in shape.

But if you want to have a long and productive career writing software, and you don’t want to end up with back problems, diabetes, or even something worse, you need to start taking care of your health.

If you want the golden eggs, don't kill the goose. If you want more productivity, take care of yourself first.

This doesn’t mean you have to start hitting the gym 5 times a week.

Or go on some crazy diet. But do sports at least 2 to 3 times a week. You can hit the gym, go for a run, or do a team sport. Right now I am doing

On the diet side, cut on sugar and refined carbs. Don’t overdo it with the meat either.

Consider your mental health as well.

Ignore advice like “eat, sleep code, repeat” and build a life outside of work.

Start a new hobby. Reach out to a friend. Take breaks.

In the short run, you might progress a bit slower. But in the long run, you will be able to stay in the game for a longer time.

🚨 P.S. Are you looking to fast-track to Senior Developer with quality resources, feedback, and accountability? Click here to join our Free Community - The Senior Dev Academy. 🚨

12. Close The Circle

Finally, Senior Devs understand how karma works. They know that no matter how hard they work, or how smart they are, dozens of people helped them on their way to the top.

This doesn’t take away their merit but acknowledges other people as well.

So they close the circle.

They help other developers out. And they do it without expectations.

Not because it might get you a promotion. Or status, or admiration. They do it because it is the right thing to do.

Even Kobe Bryant found the time to mentor young kids and get them into basketball. You can also find the time to help a fresh developer out.

Helping someone who is just starting out will give you back part of the spark. The passion and curiosity that a beginner feels when they see things for the first time is so contagious.

Another thing you can turn into a daily habit!

Okay, this is it. Put in place these 12 traits and you will fast-track your growth to a Senior level and beyond.

Moving forward, here are 2 things I want you to do:
1. What are some traits you’ve seen in Senior Developers that you think we should add to the list? Comment below, and I will try to answer all your comments!

2. If you are an ambitious developer trying to level up and you are searching for a community of like-minded people, click here to join our free community for JavaScript developers looking to fast-track to Senior level.