Starting Junior Full Stack position, tips?
Posted by Lantje@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 18 comments
I’ll be starting a Junior Full Stack Developer position soon, working with a .NET + Angular stack, and I want to make sure I’m as prepared as possible before my first day.
I already have some experience with Angular and backend development, but I still feel like there’s a lot I don’t know yet. I’d like to build more confidence and make sure I have a solid foundation going in.
For those of you who started in a similar role:
- What would you recommend focusing on before starting?
- Are there specific concepts, tools, or patterns in .NET or Angular that are especially important for a junior?
- Any tips on how to prepare in a practical way (projects, exercises, etc.)?
I’m not trying to know everything beforehand, just want to feel more confident and ready to learn quickly once I start.
Stretchslash@reddit
A lot of great advice here already, in my experience (1 year in). My first couple of months were quite overwhelming. Many evenings I came home and I felt I was out of place and felt like an imposter.
There will be a number of things you will learn in the first couple of months. You may feel fine but If you start to feel overwhelmed or out of place don't worry, It's normal.
It will pass and although I don't want this to sound insulting but don't worry about meeting grand expectations. My boss said that the first couple of years are seen as an investment, the company sees you as a worthy investment, so with that mind set ask questions even if it's something you think is simple or something you should already know ask anyways.
I wish you the best of luck.
Witty-Afternoon-2427@reddit
Focus on fundamentals and debugging, most learning will happen on the job so being comfortable figuring things out matters more than knowing everything upfront.
born_zynner@reddit
Good thing Visual Studios debugger kicks ass.
born_zynner@reddit
Learn LINQ and the ins and outs of Entity Framework. Specifically how the change tracker and context lifecycle behaves
Jarvis_the_lobster@reddit
Ask a lot of "what’s the normal way we do this here?" questions early and write the answers down somewhere you’ll actually revisit. Most junior pain is not raw coding, it’s context switching and not knowing the team’s habits yet. Also when you get stuck, show what you tried before asking for help. People respond way better to that than "it doesn’t work."
YasirTheGreat@reddit
Well, at your job you need to focus on pick up the specific tools that are being used there. Don't have to learn all the crap I've written below at once, but email someone there and ask if a senior can send you a list of things they would want you to focus on to hit the ground running.
For example, how do they do Auth between Angular and .Net. Is it a custom written middleware? Make sure you understand how that works. Is it MSAL single sign on? Make sure you understand how you register front/back end in Azure and set all that up.
What type of database they are using how do they talk to it? Is it through entity framework? Is it through Dapper? Do they have their own custom built inhouse ORM? Make sure you get familiar with w/e they use.
Another thing is how do those apps run in prod? Is Angular just a bundle of javascript that gets served by a CDN? Is it hosted inside a shell of .net app, so all requests get proxied through it. I know this was how visual studio templates worked back in the day. Are the net apps run on Linux via Kestrel and a reverse proxy from something like Apache, or are you all on Windows with IIS.
What type of front end libraries are being used in Angular? If you see they use ag-grid for displaying grids, then get familiar with that.
National-Motor3382@reddit
don't study more angular or .NET before day one. seriously. you'll learn way more in the first week of reading their actual codebase than in a month of tutorials.
what i'd actually do instead: get comfortable reading code you didn't write. grab any open source .NET + angular project on github and just read it. don't build anything. just trace how a request goes from the frontend to the API to the database and back. that skill — reading and navigating unfamiliar code — is what separates juniors who ramp up fast from ones who struggle.
also: on day one, ask your lead how they prefer you to ask questions. some people want slack messages, some want you to batch questions, some want you to timebox 30 min before asking. knowing their style saves you a lot of awkward early interactions.
mandzeete@reddit
That you got accepted means you passed some sort of validation. So, you should worry less about your tech stack, now. If you do not know git or if your experience is shallow, you do can look into improving your git skills. Learn to use feature branches. Learn to submit merge/pull requests.
My advice is more in terms of soft skills. You can have all kind of knowledge in .NET and in Angular but if you are unable to function in a team, then you might not pass your probation period.
1)Do not get overwhelmed. Yes, your team mates know more than you do. That you start as a junior developer does not mean you must know everything on the same level as mid-level or as a senior developer. If you have a need to compare yourself with others then take it as a way to improve yourself not as a way to put yourself down. Have a growth mindset. If your teammate knows something you do not know then write it down somewhere. Google it up. Read about it. Take that knowledge gap or a skill gap as an opportunity to improve and grow.
2)When you have managed to overwhelm yourself then talk with your mentor, with somebody in your team, with your boss. Do not become alone with your worries. May it be about workload, about deadlines, about some technical stuff you do not know. Talk about it. If your team is using Slack, Teams or any other messaging platform then ask questions.
There are no stupid questions. Anything that comes in your mind, ask it away. Even when you feel ashamed. Your git does not work? Ask about it. Your IDE shows that absolutely the whole project is not compiling (libraries are red and whatnot)? Ask about it.
About asking questions, DO first make an effort on your own. Do not expect handholding. Be ready to tell what did you try, what went wrong, etc. when you are asking for help. Not just "this and that does not work". Okay, it does not work but are there any errors? Did you try to solve this somehow?
3)Make notes. Either into some Word document, Google Docs, Notepad or something else. It will be your knowledgebase, your planning tool, your (initial) time logging tool, etc.
4)When you start, ask if there is any onboarding program, any documentation you should read. Often teams make instructions for new employees to onboard them faster. To get your local development environment up and running. You can also ask if there is any mentoring system in the team or any person you can ask questions from, or if it is free-for-all and you can just ask for advice in the teams' chat or such.
5)Show initiative, be active. You will participate in various meetings. May it be a backlog review (the team checks the tasks they will start working on), a spring review (the team discusses how the last 2 weeks or so went) or something else. Pay attention, if necessary, make notes, ask questions, tell your opinion. But that also when there is no meeting but you get some idea. Voice it out.
6)Most likely your team will have morning meetings, morning standups. There everybody will tell what he did yesterday, the issues he had, and what he will do today. Try to be somewhat informative when it is your turn to tell about your progress. Not just "I was working on my task" but more like "I added this and that endpoint. Added some tests. Today I will continue with testing it in our testing environment. After that I am open to a new task." The first way does not tell absolutely anything about how your task is progressing. The second one is informative and clear. But also do not go into too much details "I added getUserInformation() method into UserResource class. Then I added UserResourceUnitTest and ...." That is too detailed. Can be that in the meeting there are people who do not write the code. Can be that there are also people form your client's side. For them "getUserInformation()" method tells nothing. Try to be informative also to the people who do not read the code.
7)You do not need to do any exercises beforehand. Unless it is learning to use git.
8)You WILL get feedback on your code. May it be from code review, from merge/pull request review, from the QA or such. That feedback is a normal part of the development process. It is not that you made some big mistake and you'll be punished. No. Code review and QA testing is there for a reason. If they find something, fix it. Learn from it. And that's it. Take it as an additional task you have to do as part of your current ongoing task/ticket.
9)You most likely will get a work laptop. Keep your private life away from it. e.g. no installation of games and such. Reading news and perhaps Youtube are fine, though. But consider that your company's sysadmins are aware of the websites you go to and the stuff you install in the laptop.
Lantje@reddit (OP)
Thanks, this is actually a big help reading this
abbasovdev@reddit
Congrats on your new journey :)
Be relax. Most likely you will have couple of meetings where you will meet with the team and other stakeholders. Listen them carefully, ask questions about their daily work or project specific or specific tool the team using that you’re interested in.
I can’t recommend any specific tool but first day I believe it doesn’t matter. Most of the time each company/team has their own patterns, approach, style.
No need to do any project or exercise beforehand.
In general, during probation period I would suggest
Hope this will helpful. Good luck!
Lantje@reddit (OP)
Thank you
Jolly_Drink_9150@reddit
Don't use AI and rely on it.
Start making things now, but a lot of things you make now won't be the same way as the businesses way of doing things.
Docker, AWS/Azure, Nomad, try to understand them.
If you haven't wrriten test, start writing them, they are a nightmare to deal with.
Talk to seniors.
Lantje@reddit (OP)
Thanks, because i feel like use of AI has sometimes stopped me from learning more
ExtraTNT@reddit
Mediator and dependency injection are important in c#
Also look at haskell, not for the syntax part, but functional programming within a handler in .net is extremely powerful and allows you to write much more readable code. Also linq, powerful af…
Git is also sth you should know the basics of…
Aspnet 7 had a really good example project, add mediator to it and you got a scalable base for api services…
Lantje@reddit (OP)
Thanks, will definitely look into those things
No_Lawyer1947@reddit
You don’t know what you don’t know. Ask questions, don’t pretend to know stuff and not ask about it. Be curious but not performative. Try to solve things by yourself first and read docs, if you can’t then go seek help, tell the what you already tried. Good luck!
Plenty_Line2696@reddit
learn stuff as you go, and pick your battles to learn what's relevant as in needed to complete your tasks, you don't need to know everything so take it as it comes and don't burn out!
NeedleworkerLumpy907@reddit
From my experience: before day one get your dev env and git creds working, clone the repo and run the app locally so you can step through a full request, learn the dotnet CLI and EF Core basics and the Angular CLI and how the project organises modules/components, write a couple of unit tests then ship a tiny imperfect PR, get comfy with debugging (Visual Studio/Chrome DevTools), Postman, Docker and basic SQL, ask for the README and architecture diagram and follow the code style guide, practise small refactors and clear commit messages, but you wont be expected to know everything and youll learn most on the job over the first 3 months so dont stress if you feel overwhelmed, focus on building one small CRUD feature end-to-end beforehand, itll make you feel alot more confident