[pragmatic]

Building, releasing and supporting your own app.

We don’t let junior devs do this now because programs are huge. We throw junior devs into bug fixes on large existing code bases (which are often not well architected, full of tech debt, etc)

There needs to be a step between the toy projects in college courses and the million+ line code bases.

Building, releasing and supporting small apps successfully, interacting with users, making changes they want and actually delighting them gave me a huge confidence boost in my early career.

We do a disservice to junior devs now.