Becoming an Expert: 3 Tips to Increase your Authority

Everybody knows it’s difficult to get a job in software development, especially for junior developers. This article is going to teach you how to hack the system, so to speak. After reading it, you will pave the way to being considered an expert in your field.

1. Contribute to Open-Source

Everybody knows contributing to open-source code can increase your authority, especially if you get your pull-requests merged. However, not many junior developers know how to contribute to open-source.

For the sake of the article, we’re going to assume you know how to use Git and GitHub.

You might have looked at some repositories, peaked into the issues, and thought “nope, nothing for me to do.”

We’ve been there at one point as well. It’s intimidating.

Your contributions don’t need to be major in the beginning stages. Fix typos. Add a different color scheme. Add documentation. You might think these are small contributions, but that’s not true. They’re indeed very helpful, and the maintainers will appreciate you.

You should strive to start contributing code as soon as possible, though.

2. Building Projects

Aside from contributing to other people’s open-source, you can create it. The first thing you should do as a developer is to get on GitHub, and start uploading your projects.

It can be anything. An HTML and CSS theme, a calculator, a fullstack MERN application, etc. It doesn’t matter. But as you grow as a developer, you should start replacing your toy projects with real ones.

It’s even better if you create something useful that other people are using.

3. Establishing Authority

Answering Questions

There are various sites where users post questions and other users submit answers. Some of them are Quora, StackOverflow, and Reddit. Get on these platforms and start browsing the questions. Eventually, at least one of them will be perfect for you to answer.

And it will get easier.

Once you start answering questions, you’ll get a feel for it. You’ll find yourself writing with ease, and having fun with it, all while improving your authority to the given subject.

Blogging & Writing Books

Answering questions is nice. However, if you want to really show off your knowledge, get writing on a blog, or, even better, writing books.

A blog is super easy to set up, anyone can do it.

So there’s not much reason not to do it.

I don’t know what to write about. – Everyone whose thought of creating a blog.

Just write. Have you taken a course recently? Review it. Was it good? What could it have done better?

Learned how to solve an algorithm with JavaScript? Write about it. Teach the world how to solve it, too.

If this sounds interesting, we do accept guest posts. You can write for JavaScript Today. Send us a message with the title and description of what you’d like to have published.