151–160 of 460 posts
Which is a fluffy way of saying when you tell someone at 4:55pm "I'm leaving now but I'll get to it first thing in the morning", you actually do it first thing in the morning.
Conversely, don’t spread yourself too thin. Try a lot of languages out then narrow it down to a few you find interesting and useful, then focus on learning those few.
Good enough is better than perfect. It is also way better than 'not yet done'. Always have targets in mind. Even green field explorative projects should have targets. Good engineers ship. Abstraction and encapsulation is overrated. Premature generalization is the root of all evil. Knowledge is no substitute for experience. You cannot google what you do not know it exists.
Don't decide too early. If you can postpone a decision that doesn't delay your overall work, then postpone it. You may have more data later to take the right decision.
Don't optimize too early (premature optimization). Always try first the simpler approach, you will finish earlier, get simpler code and find out that some minor optimizations or not at all are needed. You should always check this with real world data / scenarios.
Sleep well.
Take care of your body and your mental health.
Try to turn any feelings of inadequacy or imposter syndrome into energy to push yourself forward and increase your skills and knowledge. We've all been there... multiple times.
Learn to code fearlessly: Are you being asked to run queries on a production box? Ask if you can get a user with read-only permissions. Change crusty old code? Maybe put a quick test harness around it.
If you're stuck when debugging a problem, think about all the assumptions you're making, and then test each one of them, no matter how obvious.
Understand that code is often ugly and weird for a reason other than incompetence. Code quality tends to be a function of time, requirements, experience, and skill.
Read at least HackerNews and possibly some other tech news site regularly. And then make sure to not get too caught up in the hype for new stuff. As someone working in technology, you are going to be learning new stuff continually (or your usefulness is going to diminish over time). By keeping up to date with tech news, you get a lot of context for what people are using, what's coming down the pipe etc. You may end u…
> Read at least HackerNews and possibly some other tech news site regularly. And then make sure to not get too caught up in the hype for new stuff. Interesting because I advise the exact opposite: do not waste time reading HN, just find one thing that is interesting and master it. Then repeat. As much as I like HN there is a lot of noise here. Novice mind can easily fall into a trap looking for signal here.
Broadening your knowledge to be aware of other stuff is also useful though. The most useful people are those who understand how multiple things work and fit together.
Asking questions like "How does this work" can be the fastest way to learn.
TLDR; I would give an eye or a hand if someone had given me this advice when I was 20.
Don't be scared of going into reading source code of libraries/frameworks you are using to understand how things work. The code will often be simpler than you think and allow you have a better, deeper understanding of how things work and empower you incredibly.
Also don't be scared if you arrive at some source code and can't make head nor tail of it. Given time and enough attempts you'll start to be able to find the info you need, but for some projects it'll never happen. :)
100% of the juniors (and an awful lot of seniors) I've ever trained simply ignore those and then come ask for help debugging.
99% of the time, the explanation for their problem is literally the first line of the stack trace/error message/whatever is red on their screen.
If you successfully adopt the mindset of "whatever the computer is telling is true from the computer point of view, so I'd better make sure I've read it" instead of "Anyway, I'll try something else and run again", you'll debug 10 times faster. And since debugging is a good part of the job, you'll be a lot more productive.