Senior Developer Roadmap

Just wanted to share this Senior Developer Roadmap I made. 🗺️

This is my take on what skills and traits you need to grow into a senior position. Feel free to ask me in the comments if you have questions about the roadmap.

TIP: middle click on the map to read the hi-res version in a new tab

Here's a quick rundown of the content included:

Prerequisite: Previous Role's Roadmap

You need to have gone through the previous roadmap for your role as outlined in roadmap.sh. This is important since your team will look to you for technical guidance in your specific stack.

Code Quality

As a senior developer, you need to uphold quality not just for your own work, but in the work of your team. This means creating standards, doing reviews and documenting as needed.

Decision Making

A senior role is characterized by making good decisions. There are many technologies we can use to create products so choosing the right one for the project is important.

Technical Solutions

Another task of a senior dev is turning ideas into practical solutions. Not only do you build new features, but you also have to fix and improve existing ones with an eye towards reliability and performance.

Communication

It's a misconception that the senior dev sits behind closed doors coding all day. You also need to be able to convey your ideas well, both to dev teammates and nontechnical colleagues.

Project Planning

Sure you might think this is a PM's job, but remember that you're also tasked to create solutions, which is part of the project planning process. So know how your company's project planning process works so you can work effectively within it.

Technical Mentorship

One of the most gratifying tasks of a senior dev is improving the technical capability of the team. This happens through mentorship.

Leadership

Finally, the best trait of a senior dev is being a good leader of the team. This is also the toughest part of the journey, since you need to cultivate new patterns of thinking that involve raising up others more than yourself.

I also put this roadmap up in Github so you can clone it easily:

https://github.com/glennsantos/senior-developer-roadmap/

There's also a checklist version of the map there, if that's more to your liking.