James Tucker Glad you found someone who's interested in helping! I tend most often to find myself in the mentor position rather than mentee, but will take your advice to heart and try to be more vocal about wanting to learn from others. Thank you!

I am in the middle of wrestling with a webhost trying to get a react/node app to work as expected. Kind if wishing after I read this that we'd just pushed our repo to Heroku instead! 😂 Thanks for the walk-through!

Back way too long ago to comfortably admit, I developed Wordpress sites for clients, using PHP 4 and 5. Now I program in JavaScript and python mostly, and it's been years since looking at PHP. But after reading your article, I think I'll give another look at its updated features and at Laravel. Thanks for the tip!

This is an excellent guide, and very reassuring to know you successfully navigated this process! I am in the process of reinventing my career now due to COVID, and even though I've been involved in tech as a personal interest and even side gig for years, it is daunting to see the requirement lists in job postings and know I only have a fraction of the skills. But I like your approach of thinking in terms of companies not roles. Thank you for the insight!

Thanks for the insights! The ones that hit hardest for me are notetaking and mentoring others. Teaching others really is the best way to learn. My question to you is: did you have a mentor when you started out? If so, how did you select and approach them, or did they select you?

Dinys Monvoisin Thanks for the feedback. That's an excellent question! If someone has just joined your company, this is a particularly great time to reach out to them to offer assistance without it seeming to infer anything about their capability. Offer yourself as a resource as a fellow teammate in case they have any questions about getting up and running in your team or within the organization as a whole. No matter how capable a person is, entering a new environment comes with a lot of uncertainty, so even if they don't take you up on the offer, you will create a lot of goodwill by showing that you are interested in helping them succeed in their new role. This will also give you a nice segue into keeping that person posted about company news or even interesting things you learn that are relevant to the project. If it is clear that they are having trouble within the scope of your team projects, offering help in terms of "hey, you really seem to be doing great so far. But I know every team is different and I don't know about you, but when I started on the team, this confused me. This is how they approach things here." will make it seem non-confrontational and more of an insider tip. Good of you to identify that someone on the team might need a little assist. It is this type of observational skill that is needed to be an excellent teammate!