This is a weekly roundup of awesome DEV comments that you may have missed. You are welcome and encouraged to boost posts and comments yourself using the #bestofdev tag.
Why do you code?, that is the question. @theycallmenucci provided a wonderful answer:
Coding for me is a means to express myself. Much like an artist and their canvas. I enjoy creating things, learning things, and solving problems.
It is as much a passion as it is a hobby and a career to me.
It is my escape.
There was a spirited discussion in the How to prevent pasting into input fields. The original article was focused on the technical details, and was NOT advocating for this practice. Still, @devhead captured the sentiment of many folks responding to the article with this top comment:
Nice write up on how to! thanks.
As to the why/why-not, let me take a moment and opine on that...
Please, please just don't do this at all, blocking the UX of a browser because you, or more likely your project manager, wants to be clever and pander the the lowest demonimator doesn't mean you need to. all it does is get in the way of what you want the user to do, and that's give you information. I shouldn't need to confirm my email, any more than i should have to confirm my middle name twice.
In an Advice for Developers in the Early Stage of their Career thread, @keptoman shared some insights now that they're three years in:
I have been a web dev for almost 3 years.
As a "soon not to be anymore" junior, I would like to share these things that I have learned the hard way :
- Find a place where there's a structure to help you learn how to be a good employee. Not too strict, not to loose.
- Keep learning, reading about new things. Anything really.
- You don't need to know everything. Don't spread yourself too thin.
- Don't be afraid to learn or understand what your colleague's jobs are. Knowing a few things in design, front-end, back-end, and management can help you understand the workplace better.
- Talk to other people. Make friends.
- Get extracurricular activities, such as sports, arts, video games, whatever... Anything that is not about coding. I will also help to stimulate your creativity.
- Don't forget to sleep. Work is not your personal life.
- Eat well.
- Find a mentor, if possible. It could be at your workplace or even on the internet! It really helps to have someone with more experience guide and help you throughout your journey.
- Share, talk, write about what you are experiencing. Don't keep it all inside.
- Once you have more experience, share it! Find a younger dev who needs mentoring.
Everyone has ideas, ways to do things, preferences... Make sure all of your knowledge doesn't come from a single source.
Also, I've seen that the more a workplace has fun activities, free time, parties, and "fun" at work, the worse and unhappy its employees are. The startups usually don't have the structure necessary to take care of a new dev. Maybe some of you have had different experiences?
Responding to the prompt of: In programming, is it better to have many small files or one large file?, @dmfay really breaks down the abstraction of "files" itself:
The idea of "files" is, for the most part, an abstraction developed to help people make sense of the contents of a disk. It's a lot easier to envision chunks of storage as documents with names and extensions and so forth than it is to try to work with byte offsets and lengths. Think of trying to find your way: street signs and buildings and landmarks help you orient yourself by dividing and delimiting space, but if you're lost in the desert, one sand dune looks much like the next.
It is perfectly possible to write programs in a single file in many languages, but tools that allow multiple source files to be "linked" into the finished product date back half a century for a reason: it makes an enormous difference to our ability to comprehend how individual parts of the system work and interact with each other. The ways in which programs may be divided into source files vary wildly depending on language, purpose, convention, and taste. But those are all essentially human factors. It doesn't matter to the computer.
Finally, in a discussion about What are the least intuitive fundamentals and best practices in software development?, @matthewbdaly explains the counter-intuitive impact about how adding developers to a project really affects development speed:
Probably the idea that adding more developers to a project slows it down.
We've all heard the quote about how nine women can't make a baby in one month, but it can be hard to understand why it's applicable to developers too.
See you next week for more great comments ✌
Top comments (1)
Congrats to @theycallmenucci , @devhead , @keptoman , @dmfay , and @matthewbdaly for making the list this week!