Understand the use case

It’s easy to get wrapped up in only focusing on the deeply technical aspects of your job, especially if many parts of the stack have technologies you haven’t worked with yet. As your career progresses over time, you will be improving the quality and readability of the code you write as well as your problem-solving skills. This takes deliberate practice, but you’re already used to this! At the beginning, it’s natural for all your energy to go towards getting up to speed with the codebase and learning how everything works together. My advice is to take some time to also understand the use case.

At the core of it, your job is to be building something that will provide a positive business impact through your development skills. Ignore the urge to dive right in and start coding and instead, take some time to learn the bigger picture. Focus your energy on gathering as much information as you can to start building your foundational knowledge of this area of the product. You can start small! When asked to build upon a feature, for example, don’t just take the ticket at face value. Ask questions (to yourself or others) about how the current feature is currently working. What are the difficulties people are having using this feature? How is this going to be an improvement to the current process? Once you have a good grasp on the ticket level, it’s time to learn about the bigger forces that impact larger business decisions. You never know, maybe your fresh perspective will offer valuable insight that no one else has brought to the table.

Christie Brandao is based in Columbus, Ohio. She is a Full Stack Serverless Web Developer for Branch, a tech-forward insurance startup focused on giving instant prices for home and auto with just a couple questions.

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