It has been three months since I graduated from a coding boot camp and started real employment as a software developer. The first week was pretty disorienting and frightening. I wasn’t sure I would be able to do it. But as the weeks rolled on, I got my feet under me and began to gain some confidence.

I am now on a team where I am in charge of functional testing and contributing to the front end, written in Angular.

Here are some tips of how to transform from a terrified boot camper to a confident (if still quite green) software developer:

• Learn the vocabulary. Throughout my first day and first week, I was in meetings where I didn’t understand 70% of what was being said. This is no good. I couldn’t speak the language and I felt like I had no chance of catching up. But don’t fret. You know more than you think. Make a list of words, technologies, and team names. After each meeting, get on the Googles and on any type of internal website and look up each and every word you didn’t know. Jira? That’s just Trello. You knew that. You just didn’t know you knew it. As your vocabulary grows, so will your understanding of your place with the company.
• Study tools before technologies. I was a .NET student at my boot camp. I was hired at a place that uses primarily Java. This freaked me out. I felt I had to dive headfirst into Java immediately, and that’s just what I did. I struggled terribly, and the reason I struggled was because I didn’t know how to use Eclipse, the IDE that is most popular with Java users. After I took a step back and learned Eclipse, I found my struggles with Java (which is basically the same as C#) became less onerous.
• Make friends. I introduce myself to basically anyone who makes brief eye contact with me. If people know you, they’ll show you stuff. You need people to show you stuff.
• Admit your weaknesses. This may come as a shock, but not every single professional software developer is a genius. It can be sort of surprising what senior level developers don’t know. So you shouldn’t be embarrassed to admit a lack of knowledge about anything. It’s expected. Ask the question if you need to ask the question.
• Keep the boot camp mentality. You thought you were done? Fool. You’re not done. You’re never done. You have to keep pushing to learn and get better. The good thing is, the job most likely will focus you on one set of skills that you can begin to master, rather than a small peppering of everything under the sun, which is what you get in a boot camp.

You got the job. That’s great. Now, instead of paying someone to teach you, someone is paying you to learn. Just remain calm and keep learning.