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8 Habits For Beginning and Mid Level JavaScript Developers That Sabotage Your Future

jsmanifest on July 17, 2019

Find me on medium It is truly an amazing time to be a JavaScript developer as they increasingly become higher in demand in the job market. The qui...

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Jim Tryon • Jul 18 '19

I agree with all the points except for social isolation. I think if you are spending time learning a library like React, it might help to remove any distractions such as family and friends. I'm not saying that family is a distraction, but I know a lot of people that learn better when they can focus all their attention on what they are doing. It can be healthy depending on the relationship that you have with your family. Most of the time, your family doesn't understand why you are trying to code.

B. Agustín Amenábar Larraín • Jul 22 '19

Testing tends to be boring, hard to set up and feels slow.
Testing is something more experienced developers do more often than junior developer.
Testing will prevent unexpected bugs stalling your project at the last 20% because you there trying to be "productive" the first 80%.
Testing is not TDD, nor 100% coverage, but trying to do any of them will teach you about your code and will catch bugs.
Testing is something I have learnt to appreciate the hard slow way.
Testing has made me much more productive although I rarely do TDD.

Tommaso Castrovillari • Jul 18 '19

Great Tips !!

On the point 7. Starting on Big Projects Too Soon:

You also have the problem that in large projects, depending on the development practice, you only dive into developing requested features or bugfixes but you are unable to dive into topics like requirements engineering, product design, deployment and user support.

In smaller projects, in most cases the chances are that you need to do some deployment or you can influence to product design as well as talking to users directly. Imho this is a great benefit because you can see the big picture of the project and not only a small part.

K • Jul 17 '19 • Edited

Good points.

I guess my unwillingness for writing tests will sooner or later lead me away from JavaScript, haha

John Kazer • Jul 17 '19

I'm finding that converting to a functional style of JS in a framework that fully supports it (hyperapp) is making me more willing/able to deal with the testing issue.