On Monday night, I’m going to be on a panel in Melbourne, in front of a crowd of aspirational junior developers, answering questions and giving advice. I’ve been a proponent for junior developers for a very long time, and ran two successful iterations of my Junior Engineering Program at Culture Amp, ending in 2019, as well as continuing to mentor developers in my current line of work.
My advice to the juniors of 2025 is plain and simple: Show, Don’t Tell. The first time I hear from a lot of juniors is probably when they apply for a job, or reach out about one. It used to be meetups but the tyranny of distance got in the way.
When they reach out, that’s when I’ll find out the regular things of what tools they’ve used. HTML, CSS, JavaScript, some framework or another. Catch me on a good day (most of them) and I’ll even take a look at their GitHub profiles and portfolios. I’m a curious sort of guy.
The ones that stand out the most do a really great job of showing me that they know the tools, and that they’ve gone past a first tutorial stage.
- A React app that ranks your favourite books, then orders them by read date, then reorders them by cover colour.
- A game you made because you had an idea you couldn’t leave behind. Yes, even if the game is naff.
- Show me a thing I didn’t think CSS could do, ever.
All of this goes a long way to showing me an aptitude that already puts you ahead of 90% of the competition. These are the outliers I will notice and think more about.
So: Show me what you can do, rather than giving me a list of tools. A Luthier and I both know how to use a saw, but only one of us knows how to make a guitar. The proof is in the doing, not the telling.
(And for god sake: use a colour other than black and white on your resumé!)