Best advice to junior programmer

Vignesh Kannan

Been a Software Developer in multiple companies for close to 10 years and I could not stress more on the following.

I’ll keep adding when I think of something new.

• Drink Coffee. Coffee is your best friend on a long day. (This is a personal opinion)

• Please solve your problems the right way. Don’t work around the problem and deliver a quick fix. It will backfire on you.

• Commit your code at regular intervals and push your code at least once in 2 days. Don’t have a lot of uncommitted code on your local environment. You never know when the system is gonna go down.

• Never use short forms for variable names. It’ll be a nightmare to understand your code after few months.

• In the same vision as the point above, always add appropriate comments to your code.

• Documentation should always live with the code. This is the current best practice. Example - Use /** Javadocs comments */ instead of writing bunch of confluence pages.

• Externalize all your static variables. This will come in easy when you are trying to localize your software.

• As a developer, write extensive unit tests. Maintain your code coverage more than 95% all the time. This will enable you to identify if your small code change will break the software.

• Configure linters in your IDE. Have your code clean.

• Adopt a common code-style for your team. Use it.

• When in doubt, always ask. You never know what others in your team know. Never under-estimate anyone.

• With regards to the point above: Don’t ask stupid questions. Look it up on google before you ask people around. There are good chances that someone else has had the same question before and already asked it online. You’ll get your answers there.

• Don’t just code for a sunny day scenario. Edge cases and error scenarios are a bitch. They’ll hit you real hard later.

• When your teammates approach you with questions, please help them. You never know when you’ll need others’ help.
  Last but not the least ….

• Don’t hesitate to learn new technologies. Get out of your comfort zone. That’s how you survive in the software industry.
  Oh, the most important of all.

Restarting your computer fixes your problems more often than you think.

Mark Ayzenshtadt

• There’s no shame in telling that you don’t know something. No one was born knowing how HTTPS works.
• There’s no shame in telling that you didn’t understand someone. Most of the time it’s not your fault and not the fault of the person who’s explaining. It’s just the nature of the problem in question.
• Yes, programmers do code the logic for every tiny bit of the application (e.g. the size of that little button in the corner) , unless there’s some library that takes care of it.
• Simple is beautiful. Explicit is beautiful.
• You will have a hard time understanding the code you wrote a couple months ago.
• You will wonder what idiot wrote that code a year ago before realising it was you.
  Languages, frameworks and libraries are tools, and should be treated as such.
  The number of edge cases can be absurd.
• There’s a world of difference between understanding how to build something and actually building it.
• Performance doesn’t matter most of the time, but sometimes it does.
• Programming is about manipulating data.