Eight months as a junior dev, and I have questions

Hi, and welcome to the blog! It’s basically my notes from being a junior dev, tidied up enough for other people to read.

I’ve been working as a junior developer for about eight months. In that time I’ve learned a lot, broken a few things, and collected a lot of questions that nobody seems to have neat answers to. So I’m going to write them down here and work through them in public.

What I’ve got lined up

• What does a junior dev even look like right now? AI can write a lot of the code now. The hard part is knowing whether that code is reliable, and that call is still on us developers. It’s also one of the hardest things to learn as a junior, so how do we get good at it?
• Who do we learn from? Seniors, docs, YouTube, Reddit, the AI itself? Everyone’s guessing a bit, and I want to figure out who’s worth listening to.
• What’s expected of us? By employers, by teams, and by ourselves. I’m pretty sure the bar has moved, and I’d like to know where to.
• Where I’m getting my info. I’ve been doing my due diligence. Mostly that’s a handful of subreddits: r/cscareerquestions, r/ExperiencedDevs and r/learnprogramming. The rest comes from my coworkers and my older brother, who are all experienced developers.

Who it’s for

Mostly other juniors, and anyone trying to become one. If you’re in the same spot, figuring it out as you go, I hope some of this saves you a bit of time (or at least makes you feel less alone in the confusion).