Some tips for new apprentices
With the experience that I have in the apprenticeship program, I have noticed certain actions that, if implemented from the beginning of the intership, and taken into account every day, will help you get the best out of it and at the same time to perform well as an apprentice.
- There is no need to be afraid to ask or feel what is holding up coworkers by seeking their help
It is important to remember that we are just learning and that because we are in the Apprenticeship program, this is totally normal and habitual behavior in this range of knowledge, and that all the colleagues in Pernix know it. That’s why you should not think it is wrong to ask a lot when we are very stuck, if this were bad, the company would hired a Senior instead. We are here to learn. It is also important to recognize that if we are not going to complete a task in the established time, we must immediately notify the team that we need their help, putting pride aside, we are a team and we will do everything possible so that we can all finish the tasks on time, what affects one person on the team, affects the whole team.
2. Never stop learning in your free time:
It is very common to forget to learn because many times we focus on the project, because there is a lot of pressure to complete the tasks on time, but this we cannot let it happen. What we learn by working is not going to be enough to be a good programmer, we need to be learning extra things, because when many times we rely on existing codes within the application to perform a task, that is fine, we are learning, but we should not let this become a dependency, what will happen if one day we need to perform a functionality that is not implemented in the application? It is very likely that we will feel very lost and do not know where to start. For this reason, it is important to always be learning, since this will provide us with a good base to solve new challenges during the development of the project.
3. Do not focus on only finishing tasks as quickly as possible: Being a good developer is not just about finishing tasks, and being as productive as possible, many times we focus on this and leave aside very important aspects such as efficiency of the code and the clean code, which will cause our code to be rejected, and this is the opposite of being productive, because we are doing the task practically twice for not doing it well from the beginning. For these it is important never to forget the quality of the code, and carefully review what we did before submitting it to the repository. If we do not hurry we will not finish the tasks on time, for this we must carry out our work calmly and patiently.
