 Hello, everyone. My name is Daria Grudje. I work as a site reliability engineer currently at APRE. And I'm also a co-founder of Cyber Magnolia, a growing women's tech collective in the Czech Republic. Today I wanted to talk to you and share a couple of tips and tricks that I have on how to be more effective and have more fun working as a junior in a technical role. When preparing this talk, I was thinking mainly about people who are either students or working in their first position in technical roles in software engineering or web development. But I believe that a lot of these will be useful also to people in non-technical roles as well as more senior. So the origin of the talk actually is a blog post because personally I got a chance to be a junior twice. I changed career into engineering a few years back and I feel like the second time around I had a chance to approach this experience more mindfully. And I decided to write down my own experiences and learnings as well as the result of conversations with my friends and colleagues and the feedback that I have gathered from my either senior colleagues at work or my managers on how to be more effective as a junior. The blog post got a little bit more popular than I expected, so I decided to try it as a talk. And I'm super curious how you'll like it. I'm really waiting to hear whether it works. So let's get to it. I will start by introducing the outline real quick. We will talk about how to make it easy for other people to help you. The managing app and the importance of that. Ownership and how much everyone should display it at work. Sustainable learning and how to make sure that you continue learning throughout your whole career. And self-care and well-being, something that not many people still talk about in the professional context. Before we dive into the talk, to everyone out there who identifies as a junior, I wanted to pause and acknowledge this one thing. You're awesome. What you're doing is really hard. Yes, it's fun. It's also really hard. Starting your career, particularly in a technical role, is not as an easy thing. There's a lot of stuff to figure out. So kudos. Keep up the good work. First up, we're going to talk about how to make it easy for other people to help you. Why is that important? Because the better you get at it and preparing everything, the less time you will take from your more senior colleagues, which will mean that they will be more likely to help you in the future. And as a result, the whole team will benefit you, your senior colleagues, and everyone around. And the first thing to remember about when you start a new interaction with a new mentor, ask them how they like to communicate. Whether it's adding all of the comments in the pull request or setting up a meeting or writing in a particular Slack channel, write it down, remember and stick to it for the future. Do the legwork. Before you go and ask for anything, write down the commands that you use that got you into trouble or search for answers on the internet. For example, copy paste the exact error message, paste it into the search engine and see what it pops up. Collect all those useful results. You know, if you need to talk to your rubber deck, I totally have wine here. And there's a good chance that by this point, you will figure out the problem yourself. If not, however, then when you go and actually do the ask, start by presenting your problem and your hypothesis. Figure out what might be wrong. For example, I think there's a problem with the error handling in my code. And then share all those results that you prepared, because there's a good chance that this will actually be enough for them to solve your issue. And if nothing else, it will really prove that you did the work and you were serious about helping yourself, people will treat you more seriously. Second, managing up. When we think about managing someone, we mostly think about this top down approach of either team lead managing the team or the project manager managing the people. The thing is that managing people above you is a critical skill that's important and it grows in importance, the more senior you become. It's good to start training in the beginning because this allows you to make sure that people around you help you achieve your goals, whether it's finishing your task, getting your promotion, switching to a different project, learning something new, it's a really important skill. So if it's possible, pick your own mentor for each task. When the moment will come when you will be assigned with the task and there may be a discussion of who should be the person who will be reviewing your code or giving you final approval, ask for a specific person, make your voice heard, make sure you participate in this decision. And when you pick that person, look for someone who's considered an expert on the topic. Say you would want to improve the performance of certain queries in a MongoDB database. Look for the person who's a Mongo expert because this way there's a better chance that you will learn best practices first and you will learn them faster. This is something that I've learned painfully on my own skin and also observed around. Avoid having two equally important code reviewers. It happens to me that I was developing a new script and the person requesting them was our architect, but since it was the first serious job I was doing in Python, I asked a colleague of mine who's a Python mentor to also give me his tips. What I spent most of the time doing is managing consensus between them because one of them was really focused on how maintainable this code will be in the future and how other people will be able to contribute to it and how readable it is. The other one was mainly interested in how well it will perform once deployed into production. Impossible to satisfy both took a lot of energy. Avoid it. Avoid it at all costs. Ownership is next on our agenda. What it means really for you is that for every test that you get, you are the project manager for it. It's really important. What it means in practice is that you're responsible for both proactively communicating its status and for delivering the task. From the perspective of the person who assigns you the task, it's really ideal when they can just hand it over to you and trust that you will either deliver it on time. If there's any delay, you will communicate that up front so they can respond to it. If you will need any help, you will ask for it, ideally figure out who's the best person to give it to you. It's fantastic to work with people like that. Everyone enjoys it. Everyone remembers it for years. You want to be this person and really this is the way to do it. And next up, apologies. Sustainable learning. If you haven't done this already, this is really a good time to figure out your own learning style. So, for example, whether it's watching conference talks, or reading books, or maybe creating some proof of concept by yourself with a new technology, you should know it by now and remember it and use it. The next part is to figure out the schedule, how to make sure that this learning happens regularly. And something that my boss recommended is either to set a specific hour during the day, let's say 2pm after lunch to work with something new, something that you don't really work on the job, or dedicate half of Friday for that learning and make it a quality time. This is pretty important. You want to make sure that this is set up so you don't even have to think about it. It happens automatically. And because of that, you want to make sure that you do learn something new every day, more or less. You notice that days go by and you haven't really learned anything new because all the tasks you do are repetitive. There wasn't a new technology and new approach. Then maybe it's time to go back to point one and review your schedule and your learning styles. But if this continues for a longer period of time, I really recommend going and talking to your manager about making some changes. Sometimes maybe just switching tasks or switching teams. Sometimes maybe it's necessary to switch the company altogether to make sure that you learn this, that you learn new stuff. Why is that important? Because as your career progresses, there will be more and more personal life responsibilities. And maybe it's still possible to cram some extra projects on weekends. This will get harder with years. So it's really an advice from all their colleagues to make sure that this is part of your work. And the last point of the whole presentation, self-care and well-being. This really starts with an advice that I got from one of my senior colleagues who was leaving work day after day and saw me sitting at my desk in late late afternoon. And at some point he decided to come to me and say, you know what, I'm going to tell you this, you're the only person in charge of preventing your own burnout. So think about whether you really want to be spending the evenings at work. I think it was a super good advice. And I thought about it really seriously afterwards. And it's really, really true. There's absolutely nobody else, not your manager, not your partner, not your colleagues, whose well-being and self-care will be as important as it should be to you. So take care of yourself properly. Which means that on bed days, remind yourself of things you're good at. Most people, most of us mortals, we have those moments when we feel like we suck at everything or we're really not good enough or not technical enough, whatever. So we prepared for that moment. Something that I recommend and I did myself is that take a piece of paper and write ideally with your handwriting all of the things that you're really good at. Whatever it is, whether it's baking blueberry muffins, maybe you have great times on running 5Ks or maybe you're really an awesome gamer. It's really important to know those things, write them down. And when this moment comes out, I carry it in my wallet. So when it comes out, I just take it out. And I was like, oh, I suck. You know, okay, I'm pretty good at doing muffins. So maybe it's not so bad. It makes sense. It really will help you when the moment comes. And if you ever hear yourself actually saying stuff like I suck, pause for a second and ask yourself this question. Is this something that you would tell your friend? There's a good chance that you wouldn't. And if they would come saying, oh, I suck, I'm awful. I'm totally not capable of doing this. There's a good chance you will say something like, I don't think so. I think you just had a bad day and maybe you're tired and you cannot figure out this task, but the world doesn't end here. You get a chance to do it again tomorrow. You'll do better. It's okay. You're still an awesome person. Try to talk to yourself. You're your own best friend because it will really change how you feel about yourself and will give you more energy to really tackle problems going forward. And know what helps you recharge and do it regularly. It's really important because if your personal energy levels are at 100% and then go to 80, it's much easier to top them up than when it goes all the way to zero and working all your way back from that point. So it's important to know and write down particularly if you're in the good place in your life at the moment. The stuff that you enjoy doing. So maybe it's hanging out with your buddies. Maybe it is playing the computer game. Maybe it's hiking somewhere, going for a run. Write this down and also the way you set up a sustainable learning schedule. Make sure that you do those things regularly and particularly if you find yourself feeling less energetic, do one of those things that will recharge you. It's really, really much easier and it will help you. I think we see it particularly now when everyone is working from home and it's really tough. It's really important to have a procedure like that. And that's it. If you'd like to dive deep into the topic, I have prepared a couple of resources. I will share this slide deck like other speakers, but also you can find me on Twitter at Daria Grudin where I shared the slides. If you have any comments, questions, I'm totally looking forward to answering them now in the Q&A or somewhere on Discord or on Twitter. And so thank you very much for your time and your attention and good luck on your own journey. Thank you.