What does it mean to be a junior developer

Photo by: Maxim Zolotukhin

Hi Habr! I want to tell you about a small community of junior developers in Almaty and my way of a junior developer in the Kazakhstan web.

First, I’ll tell you some dry data about Almaty. Almaty is a very large city in Kazakhstan, with a population of 1.5-2 million people. There are not so many technical universities, especially in which they normally try to teach programming. A lot of small web studios. There are also large software offices, focused more on banks and enterprises. There is no Yandex office in the city, but there is its official representative. There are two coworking centers and a slop 4G internet. Now I am 20 years old (like most of my acquaintances / friends of programmers) and I am a junior web developer in the studio.

I would build a house went, let them teach me

For one and a half years of work in the studio, I learned more than 4 years in college and 4 future years at the university. Do not get it wrong, but the classical scheme of education in the field of IT in Almaty is so far behind the times that there is no point in “learning” in secondary specialized and higher educational institutions.
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During college, this is what happens:

• You acquire the skill of drawing flowcharts. You know by heart the standards of aspect ratio, and you can draw any structure without a ruler. It does not matter that they give you so simple tasks that do not even require drawings, follow the standards.
• You are taught two kinds of sorting. The fact that they are useless, you do not say.
• You get the skill to build simple SQL queries. During the week you are taught to do the “right” requests, and you are constantly forced to write lab work. When the word "index" teacher already looks at you with suspicion, you accidentally installed MySQL on the training computer in front of the teacher? Congratulations, you will read the next 5 lectures.
• You are taught to work in Delphi 7. You are tactfully silent about the fact that there is an Embarcadero Delphi XE2, so as not to frighten the professor. They are a hot-tempered people, will be called a heretic, and that’s it, your cosmonaut wept.
• You are taught OOP. But forced to write in C ++. Without the use of classes.
• You are forced to take useless coursework, which consists of an infinite number of printed sheets of paper and donated chocolates. And yes, in unnumbered indent lists there should be one and a half divisions. Reprint.
• With web development couples you are taught to typeset. Spreadsheets And of course you will learn how to install Denwer. In PHP, you can parse the POST request.

Against the background of all this disgrace, college students starting from the 2nd to the 3rd course start looking for work. Those who are lucky, get into the team, where they are grown in full fighters. I was lucky. I got into the best studio that you can find. All that I had at that time was a look hungry for knowledge and 20 rubles for snickers.

What gave the combat experience in a web studio, instead of time spent in college:

• I learned to think. To solve real problems, to approach the solution from different sides, to weigh the pros and cons.
• Imposition. CSS2, CSS3, correct structures and layout techniques. CSS frameworks, template engines, compatibility with different versions of browsers.
• PHP5 and Yii development. The correct design patterns. Next in line is the Gang of Four, as soon as the hands reach.
• Work with version control systems. Mercurial and Git.
• More intimate acquaintance with MySQL. Understanding of the basic principles of optimization. Change preferences to MariaDB. Experience of integration with MSSqlServer 2005, the first tears of despair.
• Acquaintance with NodeJS and MongoDB.
• Experience with jQuery and AngularJS, including writing your own crutches and plugins.
• Experience with sockets.
• Work with the search engine ElasticSearch.
• In a number of tasks, we had to recall geometry.
• Experience deploying projects to fight. Stability monitoring. Writing your little crutches on bash.

What does it mean to be a junior

Being a junior means constantly doubting your abilities and skills. Here you sit, young and green, look up at guys with experience of more than 5-8 years and wonder how they find solutions so quickly, how do they type this damn code at a machine gun speed? I am a junior and almost every day I come up with tasks for which I cannot immediately come up with a ready-made solution. At the same time, for others, it seems no problem. And often I stop, thinking, but am I doing everything right?

Being a junior means competing. When someone of your friends boasts that he used, say, Phalcon on the project, an incredible storm of emotions arises in the head. Interest, envy, disappointment in yourself. “Damn, this dude has already touched Phalcon and Solr, and I'm sitting and picking up all the plugin”. Among my peers and acquaintances, everything that I know or what I came across is the norm. We all - constantly learn something, as long as we have such an opportunity. We are going to the bar, or encounter at some meetings, and constantly discuss something new.

Being a junior is looking for like-minded people. Any developer from our sphere is first of all a colleague and an interesting interlocutor, and then a fighter from a competing company. Give us only a reason to talk about technology, development or projects. The main problem in Almaty is a very small number of events and a small community. There are conferences, there are some seminars, but they are all aimed more at squeezing money, public relations of some companies and chatter among business elites or managers. There are almost no events concerning technologies that provide some knowledge or share experience. The last major event was BarCampCA in 2011. Since then, conferences of this level and quality have simply not been observed. There are small parties, there is GTUG Almaty, but this is not enough.

To be a junior is to mow. Have you ever seen what happens if a junior is given access to a server as root? And I saw. My friend in a hurry accidentally rebooted the remote server. Well, I accidentally unloaded an untested script. The consequences usually immediately make themselves felt.

Being a junior means working overtime. Just because you are slow, because you do not understand something, because you need to read something. Sometimes you have to come on the weekend. And this is normal, because you get experience and knowledge.
To be a junior is to test your strength in competitions and contests. Trying to do something important. Breaking into Hackday with a possibly delusional idea and spending the night at the office on the table Make a list of ideas in a neat daddy “Future projects”, and dream of making them under the slogan “Weekend Project”.

Being a junior means finding new examples to follow. Try to learn from any experience and constantly look up. Ask stupid questions at seminars and catch mocking or condescending eyes on you. Enjoy even a small dialogue with SamDark, watch online broadcasts from conferences at 3 am, sit in IRC on RadioT.

Total

No matter how silly it may sound: “I am a junior - and I am proud of it”! We all have burning eyes and we love what we do. Perhaps our skills are still weak, the community is not developed, and the wind is in our heads, but we will definitely contribute to the development of our sphere and perhaps the whole of Kaznet.