Making the Leap: Going from Junior to Mid level Dev

It has been about 9 months now since I first started learning to be a ruby developer. 9 months is young. But I am not exactly a total beginner anymore. There are plenty of things that I just don’t know, and of course so much to learn. But I have grown up a little since the days of last fall.

All this learning and growing is starting to pay off. And with these lessons is coming my Web Dev adolescence. I am not quite there yet, but I am definitely facing pre-teen angst right now.I noticed it first when I keep looking for new resources, and found myself doing beginner tutorials again and again. It started to become apparent when I realized that I knew some of the answers on stack overflow, and was annoyed to not find the more in depth explanation that I really need. Now I can see it in my struggle to make large leaps in my knowledge as I go into new territories.

I am approaching that weird stage where I am getting to advanced for beginner info, but I am not yet advanced enough for senior dev talk. And unfortunately, it seems that the internet is split into these two categories. I have been searching for what to do next and new ways to advance myself.

In my hunting for something illuminating, I found this awesome article. I think it has some timely advice to help adolescents like me to keep moving along. There is also this packet about becoming a software developer that discusses the whole cycle. This blog post about being a junior dev has some great advice about preparing for the next step.

I am eager to keep growing and keep learning how to improve. And I am looking forward to the day when I feel that I have truly made the leap to the next lily pad on my journey as a software developer.