I’m well aware this post has been asked to death on Reddit, but I couldn’t find anything relevant on Lemmy so I thought I’d give it a shot.
I’m starting my first SDE job next week, and to be honest I’ve never really been a dev in a professional environment before. I’ve had an internship where the bar was very low so I did decently, and a part-time gig where I just assigned myself tickets. Either way I’ve never worked on a larger team or in a specific org before.
Apart from the usual like “ask questions when you’re stuck”, “write proper documentation”, “be proactive”, and “communicate well”, what are some technical things I should be familiar with to make sure I’m not bogging anyone down?
More specifically, are there concepts I should know/I am expected to know of that I might not have learned in university?
Whatever the tech you’re using, find the primary documentation for it, and read it carefully until you understand it properly. Rinse and repeat for 30 years and you’ll be a guru.
Good advice already in this thread, but I’d add: ask smart questions, and when you’re engaging with a senior/mentor, build the picture for them. Everyone (including your mentor) expects you to have questions - they want you to ask questions, rather than just spinning your wheels for days and days. But they also want to know what you’ve tried and what you’ve looked at for resources. And despite appearances, they don’t always have the entire code base committed to memory. :)
For instance - suppose you’d been asked to, using the UI, return a piece of information from an external API and display it within the UI.
Bad question: “Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but I’m not getting a return.”
“Okay - what kind of code are you getting? And what do the docs say?”
🤷♂️
Good question: “Hey, so I tried to integrate that third party API, but the return I’m getting from it is a 401 error. That should be an authentication error - but just in case, I pinged their server from our server, and they can reach each other. The documentation says that I have to use our key to get a JWT, but hitting the endpoint it says gives me a 401 error. I double checked our token; I’ve got the right one. And I’m sending it in the header as ‘auth’ like the documentation says. Where else should I look?”
“Oh yeah, that’s a tricky one - you have to encode the token before you send it; let me see if I’ve got an example where you can see what that looks like…”
One of the things that will happen over time, based on the questions that more senior SDEs ask, you’ll be able to ‘rubber ducky’ problem solve by asking yourself the questions that they would usually ask you, and it’s shockingly effective to help you sort your own problems out and clear your own blockers.
