early career devs

I know how hard it is to give everything you got for job interviews only to be rejected every time. It’s so hard to keep going because every time you get a rejection, it makes you doubt if you’re a good developer. In my experience, the feeling of not being a good developer never goes away. It’s something worth learning how to handle so it doesn’t keep sabotaging you. Truly said, nobody wants to hire people with less than 3-5 years of experience....

You’re focusing on finding that first Ruby job. You’ve been practicing for months or years. You’ve been applying to entry-level jobs, even internships. You polish your resume. Tweak your portfolio. Attach your CV. Press Submit. Chirp, chirp, chirp 🦗 Nothing happens. Worse: you do an amazing interview, people loved you. But then they say they are moving forward with someone else that has more experience. Welp, next time is going to be different....

When you get stuck, it’s really easy to block yourself from creatively solving your problem. You start asking “why am I so dumb?”, or thinking that you don’t have a programmer’s brain, or feeling that you’ll never understand anything. How is that helpful? It isn’t. The way we talk to each other (even to ourselves) impacts our performance. It’s not self-help BS. It’s how our brain works....

You’re working on your coding project. Everything is going well. But it doesn’t take too long until you get stuck on your assignment. You try everything you possibly can, with the resources you have. You are mixing Ruby, JavaScript, Postgres. Doing crash courses, googling. You go to the docs but you don’t even know where to look. It’s almost as if it’s a foreign language. On StackOverflow, you see the same tips over and over....

You got that first job as an early career software engineer after a long job hunt. You are ready to learn a lot and advance in your career. Most times you’re fine, but sometimes you worry that you don’t contribute much value to your team. That you ask stupid questions all the time. Or that you don’t have the domain-specific knowledge required to estimate tickets accurately or to handle bugs quickly....

You show your GitHub project to people but they don’t understand what the code is about. Why should you take time to write a good README if they can simply “read the code”? They won’t even look at your code if you don’t explain what’s in it for them. Why should anyone care about it? What about making them curious about your project? It saves them time, it shows you care about good communication and that by writing good docs you probably write good code as well....

Let’s say you’re learning how to paint. When you look at the famous paintings at the museum, you might start asking yourself: “Will I ever be this good? Is this for me? Will I ever get to paint something like this?” If these questions sound familiar, it’s because you’re not alone. It’s not just you. The same questions can be applied to coding. Some things, like painting and learning how to code, are hard....

“Why is it so difficult to find Junior Ruby on Rails dev roles?" You have finished multiple online courses, workshops and might even read some books to learn Ruby. You start job hunting and you struggle to land a position because of your lack of experience. So how do you get experience with large Ruby and Rails apps when no one wants to hire early-career devs? It’s a tough market for any early-career dev with little to no experience, so it’s no different with Ruby....

If you’re someone who decided to change careers to work as a web developer, then you might be having a hard time trying to land your first job. You aren’t alone. We all have heard that there are tons of tech jobs in the market but there aren’t qualified professionals to fulfill them. So you go and spend days doing online courses and getting certifications so you can join the wave....