231–240 of 460 posts
Always test your code.
It's just fine to bang out scripts or hobby projects you can see work easily enough without formal tests. In the real world not everything is tested (although probably more stuff should be than is).
Read 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…
Related: Read the official documentation. I can’t count how many times junior folks have asked me things like, does FooBarFactory constructor take an array of ints or floats? Well, what does their documentation say? Sometimes the official documentation is crap and that’s a reasonable question, but usually the answers can be found in TFM.
Find a mentor. I was lucky enough to have a couple more experienced developers take me under their wing when I was new. I learned so much from them. This idea of mentorship has fallen out of favour, but I now understand "there is nothing new under the sun".
How does one actually do this? I have a hard enough time finding close friends of any kind. And mentorship is a pretty big thing to ask of someone.
Professional institutions typically do too.
Either option takes the burden off asking someone, since you're merely applying to a pool of people that have declared a priori their willingness to be a mentor!
Find a mentor. I was lucky enough to have a couple more experienced developers take me under their wing when I was new. I learned so much from them. This idea of mentorship has fallen out of favour, but I now understand "there is nothing new under the sun".
How does one actually do this? I have a hard enough time finding close friends of any kind. And mentorship is a pretty big thing to ask of someone.
Some things that might help:
- ask lots of questions, listen, and take notes - be humble and gracious when you receive feedback. Most people avoid mentorship because its really hard to deliver negative feedback delicately. Easy to avoid it altogether. Ask for feedback actively, and start with: "what can I do better here?" or even better, before starting "how would YOU attack this problem?" - scout the organizations you want to work for ahead of time. Creep linkedin profiles, etc. Do you have similar interests to the senior devs (which will allow you to connect on personal level)?
Be Honest.
Be Humble.
Respect self and others.
Practice diligently.
Seek perfection of character.
And would also share the following quote from Hiroshi Saito (CEO of Chateraise) which I came across later in life and thought it helps to change your perspective:
Everything outside of me has something to teach me.
Read 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…
Also, when you have far too many logs, reading in reverse chronological order works most of the time, but not all the time. Generally the last error you are looking at is the error you want to find and fix, but always consider that sometimes an earlier error that seems unrelated can be the reason a later error is even possible.
Robots are coming and so is automation. Programming opportunity will only exist in custom projects but most companies want to use COTS solutions to not beholden to contractors in the long run. This change is starting to emerge and the programming opportunities for the future will start to erode.
Never Ever Stop From Learning. The skills that you have now may be top notch and covering all of today's trendiest technologies; but in possibly less than 5years, most of these will be outdated, and your expertise obsolete. Specialize yourself, but do it everyday, on everything - try new technologies, feel free not to adopt them in your daily job, but try them. Keep in mind that every year, new guys come out fresh fr…