Yesterday, I wrote about how autonomy is an important milestone in your software career.
How do you learn autonomy?
- Stop relying on senior devs to answer your questions. Take an extra 5–10 minutes of research before you ask a question of your team. Often, I write the question, and while writing I realize something I didn’t think of before.
- Get good at searching. We don’t talk about this enough, but experienced developers are really good at navigating the code base. That’s what makes them quick. Learning how to search and track down references / code snippets is an important skill, and the first step to autonomy.
- A corollary — get good at searching the web. When you don’t know how something works, your first questions should be to Google (or DuckDuckGo, or Ecosia), not your teammates. Try to put the pieces together yourself first. Then, you can ask, “I think it works like this… Is my understanding correct?”
- Tests give you confidence. Experienced developers know to check the tests for coverage of the feature they’re changing. They also write tests early, so they know if the new code works. Running the tests often is a sign of a veteran developer. Coding is all about feedback loops & shortening them.
Those are the first ideas that come to mind. I'd love to hear from my readers - are there other ways you've found to build autonomy?