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Top 10 Pieces of Advice for Becoming the Worst Developer Possible

Nader Dabit on September 22, 2020

Cover image by Dan Meyers A lot of times I see posts with people suggesting their tips on things like career advice, interview tips, or how to b...
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Jason C. McDonald

"If you can understand your own code, you're not trying."

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Nader Dabit

๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜ญ

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Margaret W.N

๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚ I'm inspired!

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Ashish Khare๐Ÿ˜Ž

๐Ÿ˜Ž

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Iago Mendes

๐Ÿคช๐Ÿคช

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Gary Bell

It's missing the bonus "Never test anything - that's what production is for. You can never hope to recreate real-world use, so why try?"

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Gil B.

LMAO

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AGiesey

Re. number 9: When I got to my second job I realized the fallacy of this. There were 3 "thought leaders" who I considered (would still consider...) mentors. But when THEY disagreed about things it dawned on me that not any one of them had the RIGHT answer. Before that I always thought there was this mystical "right" way to do things. After I had this experience I started to do my own things but to pay attention to each little decision I had to make, what my choice was and most importantly WHY I did it that way.

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Jonathan H

Sometimes there is a mystical right way to do things, especially when it comes to security. For example, it's usually a Bad Thing to "roll your own" when it comes to crypto. I've also seen rookie developers who think that the veterans are simply wrong but they just make that assumption instead of asking questions. It's not always that way - I'm just saying there are times when it can be good to follow thought leaders.

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AGiesey

Thanks for adding, I agree with your points. After re-reading my response I think that a point I was trying to make and missed was that this helped me to continue to try something before asking for help and then not get down on myself for being "wrong" when what I tried went through code review or whatever.

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Hrishi Mittal

These are all excellent! Once you've mastered these and graduated to senior developer (there's no such thing as mid-level), I have one pro tip:

When you join a new team, look at the code and be shocked at how horrible it is. "Who wrote this!?", exclaim in your first standups. Then completely rewrite core business logic (don't worry about not understanding it yet, remember tip 2 from the beginners list) using the advanced patterns that only you know (and others haven't even heard of!). Win everyone's hearts โค๏ธ๐Ÿ’š๐Ÿ’™๐Ÿ’œ.

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Junxiao Shi

TCP/IP and HTTP are so outdated. I'm building a new network protocol.
I plan to dig a tunnel and lay a fiber across the country for the new Internet. Anyone wants to donate a shovel?

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John Peters • Edited

A true masterpiece. It should be a requirement to memorize for every CS101 class available. Nobody can be hired without repeating it all.

-The Nader Principals

  • Nader Rules
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Dan Silcox

Naderโ€™s Law

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Will Johnson

Old man Nader is my favorite Nader

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devimposter

I seriously thought this was going to be a wasted read but it was pretty funny :)

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Jacob Evans

Nader...Seething, dripping sarcasm THIS IS MY HOME! The spice of LIFE my friend lmao

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CrystalHappy

So how many clicked on intergalactic beastie boys video lol havenโ€™t heard that in a long time. I still donโ€™t get why let went to const especially for new learner your start learning with let and then mid course using const I would be one of the ones fixing it to make it all match and I love html back in the day when you could design your own MySpace page I hooked all my friends up. Ha ha

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Samantha Atkins

Well, as a universal GUI specification the html/javascript/css trio does in fact really suck. It just happens to be the best universally supported one today. I would be delighted if some disgusted nerds attempted better - just not in the middle of an actual software company trying to ship product.

And the backend HTTP stack without or without graphQL is pretty awful. Slowly we try other things like websockets and http2. Which are still imho too close to what already sucks but are proof what we have isn't good enough.

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shadowtime2000

Time to make my own markup language!

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Junxiao Shi

I deliver websites in LaTeX. It's so much prettier than HTML.

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๐ŸŽงCirphrank๐Ÿ‘ฃ

Thanks for these tips, they're golden.

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Christopher Wray

Great advice! Not listening to any of it because of point 2.... wait...

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CarlyRaeJepsenStan

You should have mentioned clever coding lmao. I'll take a if/else or switch/case block over a ternary any day.

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swyx

i am glad that Clean Code is not on this list because that is obviously not something that worst developers can even comprehend

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Alexandra Kochetkova

It's mostly about frontend. That is why there are only 10 terrible tips. But things are much more serious for backend developers (C++)!
60 terrible tips for a C++ developer - pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/cpp/1...

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Jan Kรผster • Edited

Don't learn the underlying concepts of a language or framework, just get things done until the deadline. Everybody will love your for that, especially management.

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Nicola Erario

Fantastic post, โ€œbut what about readabilityโ€??!
๐Ÿ˜‚

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Todd Libby

CSS is the hardest thing ever. So either use a framework or it's so old, don't use it at all.

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Mihail Malo

Nothing wrong with the last one if you don't take over one day for the whole codebase.

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Enmorial

I had a good laugh reading your Post here :D .

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0x46656C6978

Ha, ha

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Albert Angmor

This is the stuff of legends....copy and paste everything. no need to understand

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codingfix

๐Ÿ˜‚๐Ÿ˜‚

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Nitsan Avni

I do #1 all the time ๐Ÿคฆ๐Ÿปโ€โ™‚๏ธ

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david howard

corollary to #9. Always argue with the thought leaders and senior guys. They obviously know nothing about how things work and what the tradeoffs are. They are old and stupid.