Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

431–440 of 460 posts

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

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not suggesting someone spend all of their time writing code outside of work, I certainly don't, so please don't label what I'm saying as such, or as "bullshit". Yes employers pull that crap, and want you to sell your soul, that's not what I'm suggesting. I don't think programming is something you become good at simply by doing your 9-5. I've worked with a lot of 9-5'ers and they're rarely the best or most rewarde…

I don't disagree with most of what you say, however: If you have a (code) problem at the end of the day it's often best to just stop - maybe even finish early. When you sit down in the morning more often than not it'll seem much easier to fix, your subconscious will have been working on it overnight. That's better than sitting there for another hour or two in the evening getting increasingly tired and ineffective, mi…

I see your point, but, here's mine; My wife is more likely to be annoyed if I'm sitting at home absent minded because I'm focused on the problem I couldn't solve today than she would be if I missed dinner or got home an hour or two late.

This is the part about not taking your work home. I'm often pre-occupied with problems I haven't solved, I find for me, taking the time to solve them, or to be sure that I can't solve it now helps with that.

I'm not disagreeing with you, some problems need to be left for another day, and I've said that already.

What I'm trying to say is that I think we're both right in a way, and that finding balance is what we need.

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

#432
- Be able to delete all your code without feeling sad about it. It's freeing to be able to delete code if a better solution presents itself. Generally these things can be found out by talking to business people and other developers, by having a session where you draw the proposed solution out on a piece of paper or by just iterating through it yourself.

- Confidence comes from trying, and failing, and trying again.

- Burnout is real. Know when you are close to it by knowing what triggers your anxiety and stop. Having the ability to remove yourself from a stressful situation, even if just for an hour makes all the difference .

- Test your steps. If you can write code to test your steps then it's great but most of the time a simple browser reload/button click or command line run action with verify if your change works will be good enough.

- It's fine if you don't know. Having the ability to ask for help will mostly be met with respect.

- You are not defined by your code as a person :)

- Theoretical pureness mostly gets in the way of solving an actual problem because of the endless debate it sparks in a team. If your goal is to write code that is readable for someone in the future then it doesn't matter what design pattern you use. Computers are fantastic at understanding code. Humans however need some help.

- Try and clean up as you go. Like your home, if the dishes pile up too much it becomes unliveable.

- Lastly, learn how to understand legacy code. It's a fantastic snapshot into the way the business was thinking at the time and to see it evolve and be that change is a privilege to be part off.

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

#433
post #55

Realize almost everyone suffers from Impostor Syndrome from time to time. Read a lot of code, not just code in the projects you work on, but reference/framework source code, open source. Perhaps even ask a subreddit for the language/tool about good examples to learn from. Realize that data is more important that code for the most part. So treat data like it's precious. That's one part of why I feel relation databases…

"Realize that data is more important that code for the most part. So treat data like it's precious." This is excellent advice.

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

#434
Where I'm employed the company's philosophy is employee time + salary earned must = overall maximum productive results. When a prospective coders interviewed the time spend debugging and recompiling takes precedence over how many times he/she attempted to fix the issue.

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

#435
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?

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.

as in tensorflow stack traces

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

#438

Save 25X your annual spending and you can retire. If you invest to earn 7%/yr (on avg), you can withdraw 4% forever. Read the book The Simple Path to Wealth, or the basics in this blog post. http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the math. Are you suggesting that you spend only 1/26 of your after tax income, and save the hypothetical remaining 25/26?

http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-sim...

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

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal is just to get to 25x your annual spending. Once you're there if you earn 7% interest and only spend 4% (what you'd normally spend in a year), you've now not only spend no money (only a piece of the interest) and that extra 3% left over accounts for inflation. So you build a pool for 25 years of spending, then just coast on that for the rest of your life. The key is to realize that it's not your earnings, bu…

...required change in spending habits (illness, emergency, inflation)

The extra 3% interest being earned that you're not spending (remember the goal is spending 4 of the 7% of interest ) SHOULD cover inflation. Hopefully. I'm not the sort to bet on that though.

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

#440
post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's annoying but fine as long as it's unique and you can grep it in the codebase.

You can forgo something being unique if you just append line and file information to the log. Literally any logging framework (even homerolled ones) should give you this by default.

yup
Post reply on HN