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Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#351

Post by sevensor »

mingeek wrote: post #317
sevensor wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten a lot of value from reading HN. I've also wasted a lot of time. It helps to develop a personal filter. Mine is * Avoid headlines that make me angry, unless the news is really important. The discussion is never worthwhile, don't even bother. * WSJ, Bloomberg, and WaPo won't let me read articles with w3m, so I skip the article. If the topic is tremendously interesting, I'll check the comments. * TED and nau…

> Avoid headlines that make me angry, unless the news is really important. The discussion is never worthwhile, don't even bother. > Know your prejudices and look for information that challenges them. How do you prevent the two of these from coming into conflict?

Headlines that make you angry are designed to make you angry. It's not about information that challenges your prejudices, it's about being intentionally provocative. I'm not interested in being baited.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#352

Post by projectileboy »

lmkg wrote: post #301
kickopotomus wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is my experience with Clojure stack traces ~60-75% of the time. Perhaps it is a symptom of functional programming? A lot of function passing and anonymous functions make it difficult to generate a meaningful stack trace.

Clojure's stack traces are an issue with Clojure specifically, and how it's hosted on top of the JVM. A lot of the stack trace you get is actually implementation details of the Java objects making up the Clojure runtime. In effect, the program that you get stack traces of is the Clojure interpreter rather than your Clojure program which is running inside that interpreter.

Fortunately, I think 1.10 is going a long way towards fixing this.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#355

Post by __exit__ »

Ask questions, no matter how stupid they may be. REALLY. Ask any doubts and questions you may have regarding coding practices, implementation details, technical workarounds, etc...

Even if the questions sound silly, which is what terrifies the most, just ask. At my first job, I was too afraid of asking my teammates unless I came up with some smart-sounding question.

Fast-forward a couple of years until now: I have a teammate who is quite less experienced, and revealed me he does not want to ask questions because he thinks it's a waste of time for the other person and/or he feels silly to the whole team.

I attempt to mentor him and teach him to ask questions, no matter how dumb may be. We've always been there.

This leads me to another aspect: have empathy towards your colleagues.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#356

Post by sincerely »

naeemtee wrote: post #175
arandr0x wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't young people allowed to, well, be young though? When you don't go to nightclubs, don't have friends to call at 1am and can't play guitar in your 400sqft apartment with neighbors on all sides of the world's thinnest walls, is it a terrible thing if coding all day and all night on relatively minor problems to make somebody else five figures a week is your primary source of excitement? Does it not beat alcohol an…

Why is the alternative nightclubs and counter-strike though? Why not, getting a good nights sleep, reading books and lifting weights?

Because you can do the latter relatively easily at any point in your life (pre-senility) unlike the former.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#357

Post by moron4hire »

scarface74 wrote: post #287
fhood wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't just a huge hint, most of the time it tells you exactly what the damn issue is. This discussion is blowing my mind. I am honestly speechless. IT GIVES YOU THE LINE NUMBER AND THE FUNCTION CALL AND THE REASON! Why would you ever even attempt to debug without parsing it?

That’s only true if the developer of the class module let the entire stack trace get through to the consumer. In C# it’s the difference between... try { .... }catch(Exception e) { //Do stuff throw new MyCustomException(“Something Bad happened”); } And try { .... }catch(Exception e) { //do stuff throw; }

Erh, exception types should include an inner exception parameter, for the generic one they wrap. So neither of your two examples are all that great.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#358

Post by wafflesraccoon »

Z-Widwil wrote: post #321
hellogoodbyeeee wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 7% is referring to the rate of return on your investments. He is making the assumption that if you invest $100 in the stock market on January 1, then on Dec 31 your account will have $107 in it. This assumption is an average over many years. There is a common rule of thumb in the investing world that you can safely remove 4% a year from your investments and they will continue to grow. (7% return minus 4% withdraw…

Quick question. Is the 80k an example you threw out, or a reasonable amount for a junior dev to make? Specifically for a a mid-sized company in the States, outside of Silicon Valley. Currently working as a junior dev and the senior devs feel I'm making less than I should be. Which is much less than that 80k. The only caveat being that my employer is also paying for part of my tuition (up to a max of $5000 a year). Pr…

Google around, check Glassdoor for dev jobs in your city. If you feel that you're under paid bring it up at your next review. If they refuse to give you more start to look for other jobs.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#359

Post by vesrah »

onion2k wrote: post #2

Don't stress about not being good enough when you see other people's work. People show off their end result and not the hundreds of broken iterations it took to get there. You can build exactly the same stuff with a bit of effort, learning and time.

This same thing relates to most things in life, you never see the struggle other people went through to get where they are.

Re: Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?

#360

Post by avhon1 »

kickopotomus wrote: post #285
eitland wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait wait wait. Not so fast. i'm one of those programmers who read manuals and stack traces but I have to admit that I've seen my share of both manuals as well as stack traces that didn't make much sense.

This is my experience with Clojure stack traces ~60-75% of the time. Perhaps it is a symptom of functional programming? A lot of function passing and anonymous functions make it difficult to generate a meaningful stack trace.

My experience in Racket has been the opposite. Especially with the aid of DrRacket's stepping debugger, reading stack traces and finding bugs is rather painless. (Figuring out the best way to fix bugs, however, is no easier than in any other language.)
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