To say that my cohort and I are excited to be writing a blog post during this capstone quarter is probably selling the feeling short. For years we have sacrificed time with families, money, mental stability, and other responsibilities all with the goal of learning something new and pivoting into the different career field.
I’ve had the privilege of landing a job before graduation and have now been in the position for a little over a year. Prior to this I participated in two SWE internships where I had a great experience working at a small indie game studio, and later at the company I would end up working at.
I am currently a full-stack engineer , but find myself primarily working on the front-end of things. I like both aspects of the job, the back end offers great complexity and I find skills learned during my time at OSU are more applicable here. The front-end offers more clear, and instant, visual feedback during development and can also be surprisingly complex.
During both of my internships and now career, I have applied advice that I received early on which I now share with you all “read the documentation first, and read the documentation often”. Whether you’re about to ask your mentor for help on a development problem, find yourself stuck on an agile story, looking for a new function to optimize your code or want to learn something now, always go to the documentation first and continue to come back to it.
This will have an even greater impact when you realize that most new engineers go to places like Stack Overflow for a first answer to a question. The answer they find there might be of some use, however, as the complexity of the repos you work in increases, you’ll start to notice that often, your problem is too niche to be answered by such boards. This is where you can score some really great points with your team, if you find yourself in a particularly tricky situation with a piece of code you’re working on and go to stand-up ready to present what you’re having trouble with during the parking lot session, and you drop the fact that you’ve scoured the documentation and have an idea of what your solution is but can’t quite implement it, chances are very high that many of the senior and staff engineers will have perked up and be paying attention knowing that you’ve done your due diligence and are willing to learn.
The impact this has on how people in your team is huge! Not only will you be establishing a great practice by making it a habit to go back to your source of truth, you’ll be taken seriously quickly by everyone around you. I tell you this from experience, not that I fancy myself some genius engineer, but I know that if I set myself up for success I will indeed make progress.
This piece of advice has opened many doors for me with some amazing developers, all because I listened to my first mentor and made sure to always keep a tab open to the docs of whatever it was I was working on at the time. As we get ready to head into the thick of one of our last quarters here at OSU and many of us venture into the job market I hope that it is something that you too will find useful!
Here’s to a great quarter.
-Bryan
Leave a Reply