First, congratulations on the new job! First programming job is exciting!
We have all been there before. Don’t sweat it too much but also don’t ignore it (you don’t seem like you are so that’s good).
Idk what you’ll be doing more of. Identify where you’ll do most of your work on focus on that. DO NOT try to learn everything at once. Maybe that means building a react app with no backend and using 3rd party services. Maybe it’s making a pure api backend and using paw/insomnia/postman to query it.
1. Go to seniors before you go to Jrs for advice. There’s a reason someone is labeled “senior”.
2. Read read and read. Go find a book on fastapi if it exists.
3. Document anything you find weird. Your coworkers will love you for it. Documenting is like teaching and you can’t do it without understanding that piece of code. Furthermore, when you make a PR with those new docs, your coworkers get a chance to say “hey you don’t fully understand this”.
4. What areas are you weak on in fundamental programming? I find most people that struggle with a framework really
lack understanding in the fundamentals. If you do not, go read a book.
Python: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1449355730/ref=nodl_?tag=hackr-20&...
Js: (No book just read mdn) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
- Do you actually know OOP?
- Can you articulate the difference between pass by value vs reference?
- Do you understand how the HTTP request cycle works? What about Tls, cors, http methods, etc?
- Synchronous vs asynchronous code?
- Scope & closures?
- The DOM?
- (This one bothers me now a days) Can you actually write vanilla js? Do you understand what react (or others) are doing under the hood?
None of these are attacks. Be honest with what you don’t know and go learn it!
5. Create a project with the exact technology. Deploy it to the same services. Yes deploying is Ops but understanding the lifecycle of your code is important. Yes you will rip your hair out deploying on aws instead of heroku. Yes it will suck. But yes, you will be a better programmer.
This is going to be the most important one:
6. Stop comparing yourself to others. Time of programming means nothing. Unless you both read the exact same books and did the exact same projects and solved the same leet code problems, you’re comparing apples to oranges. For all you know, they could have a mentor. Maybe you were reading the worst guides ever and they read the best. Pondering how this happened won’t do you any good. Just keep moving forward!
Programming is not a job you get to walk away from after your 8hrs. You can but others will leave you in the dust.
You can do this! Do your best not to stress the day to day. Focus on growth. I promise you, if you focus on learning, 90 days from now you’ll question why you were even stressed out. You just have to be honest about what you don’t know and learn it.