Java Career Advice: What I Wish I Knew as a Junior

If I could go back and give myself advice, I’d say: don’t just learn the syntax. Learn the ecosystem. Knowing Java is great, but knowing Spring, Maven, Git, and SQL is what gets you hired. Also, read other people’s code. When I was starting out, I was too proud to look at solutions. I wasted hours trying to solve problems that had elegant solutions in the standard library. Another thing: contribute to open source. It doesn’t have to be Apache; even writing a small library and publishing it on GitHub teaches you about proper packaging, documentation, and versioning. Finally, soft skills matter. Being able to explain why we should use a Stream instead of a for-loop in a code review is more effective than just saying "it’s better." The best Java developers I know are also the best communicators.