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

Beyond software development, focus on building relationships with the people you work with at your company and in your industry. This will pay dividends throughout your entire career.

Try to sleep 8 to 9 hours every day. In this JRE podcast [0], Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, claimed that sleeping poorly can decrease your performance by 30%.

Strive to maintain a good work-life balance. Burnout sucks. Your health and family are more important than work. A workplace that doesn't consider this to be the case is likely to be toxic.

As for actual software development advice... Beware blanket statements. They can help you develop a low-resolution model so you don't suffer from paralysis, but real-world problems tend to be complex and messy.

Here's an example: if you were building a traditional web app, many software engineers would probably suggest using something like PostgreSQL. That doesn't mean other database technologies don't have their place. However, PostgreSQL is able to adequately serve a large category of problems with relative ease, so it often makes for a sensible starting point. Once you become more familiarized with that domain you'll develop a higher-resolution model and you can begin to evaluate other technologies more effectively. Much of software engineering is about figuring out what tradeoffs to make.

Another example in traditional web apps is using cookies for auth. Using cookies for this purpose is well documented and pretty much supported everywhere. There's plenty of known problems with using cookies for this purpose, but the alternatives also have their own set of issues to deal with.

My final example: testing. Testing your code is great and it can be very useful, especially when refactoring or developing new features. But going for 100% code coverage is usually more trouble than it's worth. It's also very easy to end up writing a bunch of useless tests. You want to focus on the actual problem and not waste anyone's time.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwaWilO_Pig

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 are better than document/object stores. I suppose this is up for debate.

Learn to say No. It's mutual respect to say No so the one asking has a chance to ask someone else. If you instead say Yes to too much and can't deliver too close to their deadline you might screw up other people's time plans.

Outside work: Avoid eating junk food more than 1-2 times per week. Keep your weight. Go to the gym or run. Take the bike or walk to work. Sleep at least 6+ hours a day. Limit work to 40 hours/week. It's better to do 40 fresh hours than 50+ zombie hours.

Never stop learning technical things. Also, learn to negotiate, learn how to be organized, learn to prioritize. Both deadlines and requirements are very very often negotiable and movable. Even if deadline is not negotiable, the requirements typically have room in interpretation. Being dependable matters a lot.

If you never say "that estimate is too small" then you cant blame manager for assuming the estimate is good. Saying no is an option, learn to do it politely.

Sometimes manager is pressuring you, sometimes he/she really just asked when it is going to be done. Don't panic, answer truthfully.

You cant make up tomorrow or next week for time unexpected spent on something else or just wasted. That is not how it works. Factor that into estimates (whether formal or informal).

> Strive to maintain a good work-life balance. Burnout sucks. Your health and family are more important than work. A workplace that doesn't consider this to be the case is likely to be toxic.

Good advice.

It's likely burnout will really change you for the rest of your life if you don't react early enough.

It's a bit sad when you realize you'll never again be that guy you grew up and identifies as. But you also have to realize that was a person with habits that wasn't sustainable and now you have to live with that.