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Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
191–200 of 460 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#192read more code than you write. for your entire career.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#193I am writing a book specifically for these. But focusing on soft skills.
Its called "self.debug - An Emotional Guide To Being A World Class Software Engineer" - you can download it here (its free) - https://leanpub.com/selfdebug
Feel free to provide feedback on twitter to me.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#194Try and understand the big picture, not just the tiny corner you've been assigned. Working in an iso-chamber is neither pleasant nor productive. Understand where you fit.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#195Consistently be a great person to work with. Be a team player. Give feedback with kindness.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#196do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…
Couldn't disagree more. Burnout sucks... and the crash was terrible, but the things I accomplished leading up to my burnouts were the best work I've done in my life. Here's what I would say: DO IT FOR YOU, not for someone else, not for a company... do it for yourself and what you want to accomplish in your life
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#197Read the error messages. Reread them. Extract every piece of information from them. Never close an error popup without having read and understood what it means. Always read stack traces when you're blessed enough to have them. 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…
In general, I agree that juniors tend to skip useful information, but it depends a bit on the technology you are working with. PHP, for example, was known to report the error for the line after the one you forgot the semicolon at or at the line after the last line of the file when a parenthesis was missing somewhere.
While there is a reason why it did so, those are error messages which are quite hard to understand the first few times they occur to you.
Nevertheless, those lousy error message should be exceptions nowadays, and if you are using decent technologies, the chances are much higher, that you just didn't read the error message not careful enough to understand the problem.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#198do not burnout I know you are young and you feel like you're invincible. I know you can pull an all-nighter and work the next day just fine. We have all been in that situation and believe me, it is gonna take a toll at your performance ... and it could even trigger or help you develop some health issues in your life that can sabotage you down the line. Realize there's only so much progress one can do in the day. Stop…
Sometimes I worry that I've never once felt a desire to do this.
Then you are very lucky to not have had it foisted onto you. I've been on way too many death march projects. You can see the train wreck coming, you can make all the warnings and signals, but you can still end up in the middle of them, working stupid hours doing things that don't make sense and lead to burnout.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#199Always test your code.
Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
#200Respect your co-workers. They may not be as talented or knowledgeable as you but learning how to interact with a diverse group of people will pay dividends down the road in ways you can't begin to imagine. And, above all, stay on the good side of your department admin.