5 Ways to Grow as a Developer

Definite methods to up your game and advance your career

Photo by Artem Beliaikin on Unsplash

One of my many New Year resolutions this year is to grow as a developer and I know many of you also want the same.

Growing as a developer does not simply mean that you know how to implement more features than before or that you have learned a new programming language.

While those things are important, it does not guarantee that you have become a better developer.

Instead, in my opinion, skills like problem-solving, following the modern practices, knowing how to use the internet to your advantage, as well as learning skills that usually don’t directly affect development( like SEO or marketing) are factors that determine the growth of developer.

Luckily, there are a lot of ways one can improve upon these skills for free but they require time and effort.

Below are the 5 ways that will help you become a better developer:

1. Make big projects

Creating big projects that take weeks or months to complete is one of the most trusted ways to get more experience and grow your technical skills.

By big projects, I mean projects that have comprehensive features like a fully-fledged social media platform.

You can even transform your simple projects into a much larger project.

For example, if you have a simple to-do list app, you can revamp the design and add features such as email login, third party authentication(like Google Sign-in), archive folders, bookmarks as well as the ability to store different things in the list like a picture.

These big projects let you understand the importance of writing scalable and readable code.

When starting out, most of us developers tend to be inclined towards writing short, complex code snippets but in real life, readability and clean code are much more important.

Writing short complex code snippets is acceptable in small projects but in large projects, you will be reading and accessing these programs for weeks, thus writing clean and readable code is smart.

Moreover, you will also learn how to incorporate many features into a single project.

2. Contributing to open source projects

This is another step that many junior developers tend to often overlook.

Personally, contributing has made me a much better coder.

You become good at reading other people’s code which is crucial while simultaneously improving the open-source project.

However, many think that to contribute to open source projects, you need to be an expert which is not entirely true.

Vue.js issues. Source: Author.

On Github, try contributing to projects that have issues with labels like “good first issue” as they don’t require expert-level knowledge.

Most open sources have issues that are very beginner-friendly and something that most developers can fix. These issues are a good place to start your journey to open source contributions.

You can find a ton of resources online that will teach you exactly how to contribute to open-source projects.

Contributing is not only beneficial to you but also to the developer community as they can enjoy much more polished open-source libraries and frameworks.

3. Following the modern practices

Although there aren’t strict rules on how you should code as long as the code performs the required job, there do exists a set of informal rules and practices that help improve the quality of software.

Applying modern and clean practices to your code goes a long way.

Most languages receive updates that add enhanced features to simplify some of the most tasks.

For instance, JavaScript map() and forEach() function makes it easy to loop over elements in an array and perform certain tasks while also making the code look more appealing.

Following the modern practices also shows that you are up-to-date with the latest development with regards to whichever language you are using.

I have written an article that covers some of the modern practices of JavaScript given below: 5 Modern Practices of JavaScript that Every Developer Should Know 5 best tips and practices for writing clean codemedium.com

4. Writing unit tests

As the name suggests, unit tests check different “units”, that is, individual parts of your code.

Unit tests make sure your code works as you intended it to.

In other words, unit tests help you discover bugs and errors. You can run the unit tests on your local code before pushing it to the production branch.

Having the ability to write unit tests and other forms of tests can help you become a great developer.

These tests require you to write clean, modular code that is separated which can help you implement the DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) principle, thus encouraging reusability of code.

Also, testing enables you to measure your app's performance which is vital when building projects where the size of datasets is unknown.

5. Joining tech communities

Being a member of various communities as well as participating in online tech competitions can greatly help you establish a name for yourself as well as keep you in the loop with relevant updates and news.

Joining these communities comes with a lot of benefits such as sharing support, tools, guidance, and peer-programming.

There are a host of communities and groups communities you can join for absolutely free and instantly.

In my opinion, StackOverflow is an excellent place to start.

Some of the communities I suggest are joining the ‘r/cscareerquestions’ subreddit on Reddit, following programmers on Twitter as well as regularly reading Medium publications dedicated to coding such as JavaScript in Plain English.

You can also join the Hashnode community, freeCodeCamp as well as Hackernoon.

Please note that there are more such communities and these are only some that I follow and none of the links are affiliated in any way, although I do contribute actively to some of the Medium publications.

Final Thoughts

These are just some of the ways that I have used in the past year to become a better coder and I plan on following the same this year.

Following these ways and methods will surely help you become a great developer as well as establish an online presence.

Things like building big projects are also a way to grow your CV whereas being part of global tech communities can open doors for you.

Using the free resources available online, we can easily learn and grow as developers while also avoiding some of the common mistakes that we make while starting out.

Thanks for reading!