7 Basics I see every Junior dev should master

After trained 10+ Juniors in past 5 years, I keep seeing most of them repeat these mistakes again and again .

Git

These commands are something you need to type hundreds of times a week.

Master it. you have to .

Beside the commands, make sure you understand how git works: branches ,rebase, pull-push, fetch, rebase , cherry-pick, squash etc.

Be used to code conflicts (It happens very often), and resolve them well . If you not sure, contact the person and communicate, instead of overwrite with your changes !

Code navigation, Do it fast

Know your tools. no matter IDE like InteliJ , Xcode, android studio, VsCode or pycharm; or vim, notepad++, emac, atom etc. master at least ONE .make sure you have the commands in mind to quickly search lines of code or file;bookmark; go forward, backward .

When come into discussion on certain piece of code, you can navigate through the codebase in seconds ,instead of minutes .

Debugging

Once you faimilar with code base. You should know the exact path of logs, each level of log. web server, application, routing, healthcheck, database etc .

when error happens, following the http request or session id, dig in, find the server , tail the files find the error trace, quickly navigate in code find the line and fix it .

You should only ask “where should I find xx logs” < 3 times .

The more problems you solve ,faster to promo to senior . within one year is possible. The shortest I have seen is 5 months.

Ask question after research

Before ask a question. make sure you have tried something ,digged into it and traced some logs. if still can not find the issue, could be some business logic you are unsure, or not understand certain framework built internally which lack of documentation, yes, then you can need ask questions. and you have to .

But if you want to know the difference between process and thread; how nginx route request to django or flask; or what is sqlalchemy ; how to download a log file from server; what is the command to check disk space for a folder etc .better google it , you will find better answers .

Commitment