Baby Steps to Becoming Senior

I’m at a point in my career where I need to level up, the long unending forest of getting stuck in the middle has entangled me for a while. It's time for me to face my impost syndromes head-on and do the hard work of learning the rudiments of being senior and what it means to be a senior developer/ software engineer. Luckily, I have amazing mentors that are helping me in this process as I strive every day to be better and learn more.

On my new journey to being a Senior Mobile Engineer, I’ve learned that being senior doesn’t mean less work it means taking on more responsibility. At this stage you tend to realize that you even zoomed in on only just the coding aspect of software development. There’s a whole lot of other things

You have to zoom out to understand that the major thing the company exists for is to make profits not just to write code. This is when you being to realize that product management has a huge role in building scalable/ useable solutions for your users.

Another key thing is peer programming, I’ve slept on this for too long. It’s one of the easiest ways to learn by watching senior developers and why they do what they do.

Lastly, ask questions even if you understand still ask to know why things are the way they are. Most junior developers are so invested in writing clean code (not that this is bad) and shipping out features e.t.c, but they rarely bother to stop and interact with the product, design, and sales teams why things are done in a particular manner, this is a critical question you need to ask yourself to understand why the users need a certain feature, why you have to use a certain architecture in favor of another.

I’m still learning a lot and I will share some more tips as I progress. If you have tips kindly share some with me.