What, Why, and How I Will Learn From My First Developer Job

Since the start of this year, January 2nd 2019 to be specific, I’ve begun my first ever full-time developer job after graduating from university two months prior to that. I’ve joined a small developer team of 5 people as a React developer, which I’m totally enthusiastic about (even after two months of working). 😃

My main goal this year is to learn as much as possible and to work towards becoming a better developer in both technical and non-technical aspects. Over the past year, however, I’ve noticed that just spitting out code is not the only way to do so. At certain moments, I would argue that it’s also not the most effective and enjoyable way. In the community, technical blogging has been mentioned as a lot as an additional medium. However, rather than just starting to blog because people say to, I wanted to figure out why I should start blogging and what I want to get out of it. The results are stated and documented in this post. 🤔

The What and Why

• Improving my communication skills. 💬 Over the past years, I’ve been notified numerous times that I’m quite verbose in both my writing and talking. During technical interactions at my new job, this has also become quite apparent to me. One of the ways to improve in this aspect is through (technical) blogging. Just like how none of my colleagues has the time to spend half a day helping me out, neither does anybody want to read a 10 min blog post on a single trivial topic. Blogging will force me to sort out my thoughts and figure out how to communicate those properly and effectively to others. My long term goal is to improve in communicating my technical thoughts and decisions in more concise and clearer ways.
• I want to write. 📝 Writing is something that I enjoy quite a bit actually and want to do more of, but it felt like I just never had anything interesting to write about. I’m still uncertain whether my stories will be interesting, but at least I actually look forward to writing them down and learning from them myself.
• Learning from myself. 🤯 This is my first job and I’m also the newest member of the developer team by a significant margin. These together means that there will be a lot of stuff for me to learn. Rather than just letting these occasions pass by, I want to make the most out of them. Writing about them will make me analyse, structure, and reflect on those situations in a way more serious and self-criticizing manner. For me, this is the most significant motivation to start blogging.

The How

During this journey in becoming a better developer, I’ll be blogging about various learnings that I think are relevant towards this goal. These will range from improving communicational skills in a technical environment, becoming a better developer, improving technical skills in React and JavaScript, and discussing career related topics. In these posts, the focus will be on my personal experiences, learnings, difficulties, solutions (if present), and also flaws.

If you’re either interested in these topics, more personalized technical stories, or the perspective of a beginning developer, you can follow me either here or over on Twitter at @Keraito to keep up to date with my posts. I’m already working out a few topics, so stay tuned! 🎉

To finish this short post, there are two things I’m curious about regarding you:

1. Do you spend additional time on improving as a developer? If so, in what way? What do you focus on?
2. Do you think the three parts of this post have explained explained you my reasons to start blogging in a concise enough way? If not, what did you not like about it or what did you miss?

Thanks for reading and potentially answering my curiosity! 🙇🏻‍♂️