How to advance in your career as a Web Developer
How developers with 2-3 years of commercial experience should advance in their careers?
Most of the information out there helps aspiring developers.
Even the book I'm writing is for aspiring developers, looking to build a great portfolio project. The topics the book discusses should be already familiar for mid-level developers, so I began to think:
What would be a piece of good advice for developers with 2 to 3 years of commercial experience and projects behind their back?
Are there any qualities or choices you can make to separate yourself from the pack?
X Years of experience
People advance with their careers at different.
Your level (Junior/Medior/Senior) isn't tied to a specific number of years.
Over the past 15 years, I worked with people who advanced over a course of one year as many as someone over three years.
Don't look at your years of experience that's going to tell what level you are.
I always wondered, what makes some web developers grow faster in their careers?
Resposibility
The people I worked with and were able to grow fast, all had one thing in common: they wanted to take on responsibility.
When you have skin in the game things are different.
You're the owner of a subsystem, the blog of your company website?
You better make sure it works all the time because everybody knows, it's you!
Seek responsibility, try to take on the challenging things, that's one of your best bets to grow as fast as possible!
Domain-specific knowledge
I have to admit, as a full-stack engineer, I've never been the "master" of something but more like a jack of all trades.
One of the great ways to stand out with your experience is to specialize in certain technologies and write about them!
I've got many job offers after I blogged about Unit testing Stripe API integration in 2016. The post even appeared in NodeJS's weekly Newsletter! It's a specific subject, it dives into something beyond the usual tutorials of how to do X.
Online Presence
Investing in your online presence is always a good idea.
Start a professional blog where you go in-depth with topics that you care about, interesting problems you faced during work.
Some people I admire and they have a good professional blog that tells they're the masters of their trade are:
https://overreacted.io/ from Dan Abramov
and
https://kentcdodds.com/blog?q=react from Kent C. Dodds
both blogs go well beyond the usual topics of their ecosystem.
Where you are in your career, and how did you get there?
Hit the reply button, I'm curious to hear your story! 😊
Until next time 👋
Akos