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Discussion on: What advice would you give to junior developers?

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oklandon profile image
Landon Young
  1. Ask lots of questions, but also get used to doing research. Your ability to use a search engine and sift through results is one of the things you'll see grow the most early in your career.
  2. If you don't feel comfortable challenging the senior devs on your team, there is something unhealthy with the work culture.
  3. Simple code is better than clever code. Readability and maintainability is better than performance (unless we're talking orders of magnitude difference).
  4. It's okay to throw a project back to your manager/design if the acceptance criteria is unclear.
  5. If you're using an open-source language/framework, don't be afraid to jump into the source code. It'll make you better at your base language/platform.
  6. If you make a mistake, take ownership but don't beat yourself up excessively. Never take credit for somebody else's work. If you see somebody on your team doing something good, call it out.
  7. You'll never know everything, but you'll eventually have enough expertise to completely dismiss some approaches and/or say, "I've kinda done something similar before" to most common tasks in your domain.
  8. It's okay not to be 'in love' with software development, but do your best to find yourself doing the things you 'like' about it in a daily capacity.
  9. If you can master anything while starting a new language/framework/lib/etc, it should be debugging.
  10. Never trust user input.
  11. Run your code before you make a pull request.
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arikaturika profile image
Arika O

Thank you for point 8, it's refreshing to read it. Sometimes I feel like I don't want to be a software developer and I guess that's ok. It's a difficult relationship. Overall, great advice, especially point 11.