The lines between different levels of developer are blurry. Ask any senior developer, development manager or technical director what the difference between beginner, junior, mid-level and senior, and chances are, youll receive vastly differing opinions.

Since there is such a wide range of opinions, theres really no use spending any time on figuring out how to become a Senior or Mid-Level developer - levels are - for the most part - opinion.

Instead, lets look at some things you might not have considered, of which if you implement a number of these, will increase your level as a developer.

1) Build a substantial project

React JS calculator? Cool demo, but not substantial. Todo list app? Once again, fun little tool, but not substantial. Most people can follow tutorials were talking about something else...

Something with many different views, endpoints and pieces of functionality, that is unique and demonstrates some developer creativity.

What are some examples of what wed consider a substantial project?

• Tinder for dogs.
• A miniature social network for Pokemon lovers.
• An skeleton web backend or frontend framework that others could use - not that you expect to compete necessarily, but to give you an understanding of how to build one!
• Build a package in that primary programming language that you work with - one that youd use in multiple projects.

There are some funky examples there but heres the point - either build a larger project around something youre super passionate about or build something that thoroughly pushes the boundaries of what you currently understand. By definition, both of those things are going to level you up because youll be coming across concepts

2) Contribute to open source

This means build your own open source packages / applications or contribute to existing repositories.

Your own package

If youre going to build your own packages, just make sure its not from a tutorial and something you actually want to put out to the world that others could use.

Document your process

Bonus points if you create a blog post or video series around how / why you built it and your thought process. This not only allows you to think of it from a storytelling perspective and gain new insights, but its strong evidence of your abilities AND thousands of others trying to learn what youre learning get to benefit from listening to how you went about this project.

Someone elses repository

Chances are, your favourite node, PHP, python, java packages and plugins are on GitHub. Theres an even strong chance that theres at least a dozen open issues on these packages.

Check the repository contributors guidelines, usually in a .MD file in the root of the code, get a good understanding of it and go away and fix an issue. Better yet, add some functionality to it that would actually be useful.

This serves many purposes

• Evidence that you can following coding guidelines (Good for potential employer)
• Evidence that youre part of the open source community and a named contributor on a repository
• Youll learn about forking, pull requests, commits more in-depth
• Youll see what a community maintained package looks like and have a chance to adopt some better programming practices

3) Look at a senior developers code (or a programmer you know is more experienced than you)

This is one of the quickest ways to level up as a developer. Because (most of the time) youll be staring at code that is almost certainly a level above yours.

Attempt to understand it - compare it to your own to find what patterns you can implement to improve yours - take note of all the little technical things they do that you could implement to your own workflow.

This isnt always possible if youre not currently working in a company, and if youre not you can always look for open source projects from your favourite community developers who are highly experienced and read the code and try to understand.

Its also great if the developer whose code youre looking at is available to ask questions and happy to answer them - just let them know that youre trying to better understand what a seniors code looks like and get their permission to ask a few questions about things youre trying to understand. A lot of people will be happy to help out.

4) Understand more programming design patterns and principles

Look into SOLID, KISS, YAGNI, MVC, and the vast list of other odd-sounding abbreviated design patterns and principles. Theres a massive Wikipedia page of them right here and another one right here.

Read through the definitions of each one and google for examples of each - examples are super important as if you have context about how a pattern is actually implemented, youll be able to understand it better.

Chances are, theres a bunch youve not heard of. Most of the hiring managers here cant recall all of them, and a quick read through some of them refreshes our memory and allows us to look at how it would improve our coding process.

Well probably put out a blog post with some contextual pseudo code examples of this in the future - programming patterns are something that a lot of developers never even try to fully understand, and we understand why: because they make no sense as an explanation. We need examples!!!

What are some other things you can suggest to help others level up?

This is a small selection of things we think can help - please share yours with the world so other developers can benefit! No suggestions are invalid - theres probably thousands of other developers who havent thought of the basics when it comes to moving forward in their learning. Thats why were all blogging here after all!

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