How to talk to junior developers

As developers grow, they tend to learn more and more things, but what I often see is that some middle and senior developers forget that they were once juniors too.

They take things like software architecture, infrastructure, scaling, and management for granted.

Of course, everyone should write tests, that goes without saying.

But what we learn as we “age” might not be so obvious to junior developers and the ones that are just starting.

They just want to code and build interesting stuff!

So this post is directed towards more experienced developers hoping that they will be patient with new guys just getting into the industry.

Why I’m writing this

I’m a junior and I still remember how it is when you know absolutely nothing. That’s why when I’m mentoring someone, I don’t take anything for granted and explain everything in the simplest terms possible.

“This goes without saying” — NOT! I don’t believe in this. Always explain the topic in simple terms. When I watch a course or read docs on some more advanced topics, I like when things are explained well and simple. Even though I do understand when something is more complex, it takes more time for me to piece everything together, when it could be explained so much easier.

This isn’t just me talking about hard topics vs. easy topics. All around the web you see the same topics explained in different ways by different people.

Hello, World!

Everyone needs to start somewhere, and you also had a starting point where you knew nothing.

When I was just starting to learn React through courses and youtube videos, it seemed like a completely foreign language to me.

Then I went back and learned ES6 syntax, and poof — suddenly everything became clear!

But only later I stumbled upon Wes Bos’ course on React, and I was amazed about how he could explain things in simple terms.

Whenever he used filter, map or reduce array methods, he explained them and what they do. Even though I already knew, I thought that it was amazing, because there are probably a lot of people watching this course that might not know this.

So whenever you teach someone, try to see if they don’t understand something, and try to explain it simpler.

map — if we have an array of 5 bananas, we can go through them and peel them one by one. Now we have an array of 5 peeled bananas.

This is just something that was on my mind.

I’m really grateful to all of my mentors. One of them had a really good way of teaching — whenever he would explain something, he would ask me to explain it to him. If he sees that I didn’t understand the gist of it, he would explain it again in even simpler terms.

I remember when he was explaining a topic 5 times in a row, again and again until I finally understood it!

Thank you for reading, and see ya’! 🤗