Early Career Toolkit

Congratulations!

You've landed your first software engineering job (or will soon be on your way to). That's an incredible accomplishment! The diligence and effort required to land a job as an engineer are immense. Pat yourself on the back! The year ahead will be one of immense growth and self-learning.

This repo serves to aide you in having a successful first year on the job.

Having access to knowledge will give you a helpful boost and will help you lean in to become the best engineer you can be. Many engineers start their career (and often go through it) without gaining this information. There is a huge community of people around the world who have acquired great tips they wish they had when they were starting out.

Goals

Now, your first goal is to prove that you can deliver. Building accountability and trust is especially valuable.

As you may have imagined, the problems you will be attempting to solve for markets and industry are far more complex and more of a mess than the controlled environment of your university or a bootcamp. This blog post discusses the three main stages of growth as a software developer: junior, intermediate, and senior.

Your goal in the first six months is to assume the role of the good junior developer:

A good junior developer can be given a known task, and be expected to execute it quickly, and well.

Speed and quality is key here. Many tips throughout this toolkit will help accelerate high-quality execution. Some people can remain in this level for ten years. But not you! You're reading this toolkit!

If you follow these tips, by the end of year one you will assume the role of a good intermediate developer:

A good intermediate developer needs less supervision. They can be trusted to raise issues of code design, and play a valuable role in design discussions. They are also the “workhorses” of the dev team.

• You are an important contributor to your team. You lead peer reviews (PRs) and give your peers valuable feedback.
• You're following good coding practices and have mastered the art of incremental progress (topics covered later in the toolkit).
• You are starting to get into the habit of being able to plan and thinking about the overall picture instead of just cranking out a feature.

Execution

You'll be there in no time ... and time flies! But, lets jump back to the present and talk specifics, shall we?

This toolkit will cover the following topics:

• Focus on a Software Stack
• Customize a Productive Coding Environment
• Best Coding Practices
• Mentorship Guide

Click on the first link to start your journey. Live long and prosper!

Contributing

Found a typo or disagree with a topic in this toolkit? Open an issue! Have something to add? Create a pull request for review! Check out our Contributing guide on Github to start growing our knowledge-base.