Preparing tasks to onboard a junior dev

From the very beginning, Code-Garage has advocated for companies to commit to and invest more regularly in junior profiles.

We even published an open letter to recruiters on our blog!

But it's true that, as in many fields, theory is easier than practice. The onboarding of a developer during their first weeks will strongly influence their progression, their learning, and their ability to become autonomous.

There are 4 essential learning areas to achieve this autonomy, and we're going to list some ideas for tasks to assign to your junior devs in order to facilitate their technical skill development and their knowledge of the project.

Reading documentation

Do you think it's enough to assign a productive task (where code is produced) for a dev to start reading documentation?

It's not that simple.

The desire to do well and prove that one is capable will very often push juniors to only take time to read documentation when they have a problem to solve.

However, the approach (and the learning that results from it) is very different compared to having time dedicated to thoroughly reading the documentation.

If this time is considered "non-productive" by some, it is actually an essential investment!

Contributing to translation

The advantage of translating an application or a website is that it touches all pages, you have to navigate, discover, and explore the project thoroughly to find all the keys to translate.

Note that this is not about internationalization, but just the translation part

The second advantage is that the purely technical complexity is fairly low, therefore accessible, but that the work can be time-consuming, so the investment is worthwhile!

Writing tests

I won't dwell on the fact that ideally, your project should be tested (at least with unit tests) from its inception.

But it would be burying our heads in the sand to say that this is the case for 100% of projects...

So if your project lacks tests, this is a very good first task for a new dev, because it allows them to master good software development practices, but it also forces them to read the specification, and to understand how the existing code works!

Adding a field

Adding a piece of data is always simpler than updating or deleting one, because the side effects are much less significant.

But the real value, especially for fullstack devs, is getting hands-on with the data processing flow from start to finish, meaning from the front-end all the way to the database.

This will result in a better understanding of data handling within the project!

Fixing a problem

Not much to add here, except that it allows for evaluating and guiding the problem-solving approach for a code issue.

A complete guide to learning the right method for solving a code problem is available on the blog!

Creating a new page

Creating a new page, even a very simple one, provides a limited scope of action, while still requiring adherence to existing rules, such as:

• Naming/development conventions
• The site or application's architecture
• The components library
• Communication rules with the server
• Contribution and review processes
• Etc...