DEV Community

Pablo Herrero
Pablo Herrero

Posted on

What advice would you give to beginning devs?

I know that being a developer is a long-distance race:

I started with Programming Basics, Java, HTML5, CSS3, SQL, Oracle, continued with Git, GitHub, Bootstrap 4 and command line basics and now I'm learning JavaScript, TypeScript, Angular, Python, Android and I continue delving into Java.

I love front-end, back-end... mobile apps, desktop apps, web apps, websites... dammit, I swear I like all!!!

Should I focus on just one stick? What advice would you give me???

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
juliusdelta profile image
JD Gonzales

My best advice I think would be to focus on learning 1 programming language and then learning Javascript alongside. The biggest reason for JS is just cause at just about any programming job you'll have to use it.

All that being said, limiting your learning to these two languages will make learning a third language exponentially easier as you'll come to recognize the deeper differences between languages instead of just the shallow syntax differences.

Diving deep into one technology stack also forces you to move beyond learning syntax but how to solve problems in a maintainable, readable, performant way. This is probably one of the hardest things to learn and be confident in as a developer. The reason why is because you move past the language syntax and move on to employing the language to do what you need in a quality way that other people can read and maintain themselves in the future. It's learning how to discover the best way to do something. It's sort of like, learning how to discover the meta for a given chunk of code.

Like I said earlier, deep diving into one language makes it easier for you to learn a new language because instead of focusing on syntax (which is easily found with google) you focus on how that language can better solve a given problem or how to better write a solution.

This is hard to explain but hopefully that made sense.

Collapse
 
pablohs1986 profile image
Pablo Herrero • Edited

Yeah, of course it makes sense!! It's not the language, it's the correct way to solve it.

In my case, I guess I'm on the right way by further delving into Java and starting to seriously learn JavaScript (which will lead me, in the end, to Angular).

Thank you very much for the advice, I have it in mind.

Collapse
 
boxedsnake profile image
BoxedSnake

If you mention learning one low and one high level language will cover you basis for other languages since they will either fall in one of these types

Collapse
 
kingsleyijomah profile image
Kingsley Ijomah

To all new developers, there is only one main thing to focus on" START AND FINISH PROJECTS" by any means necessary.

Don't get side-tracked by new buzz words. Speak to a more experienced developer and create a ROADMAP of what to learn, and stick to it.

If you could work on one big ( complex ) project even better, this will serve as your reference point, keep revisiting it adding features, testing it different technologies when you are ready on it etc

Invest time in solving more high-quality problems, this will force you to learn deeper, READ, READ, READ code, and be very strict on yourself, just making it work is not enough, know possible ways of optimizing or preventing bugs creeping up.

If you want to work in Tech. don't wait till you think you are ready to start looking at job vacancies etc, start from day 1, this will help you know exactly what tools you should be familiar, and should be learning etc.

Collapse
 
pablohs1986 profile image
Pablo Herrero

oh man, thanks for such quality advices!!! I learned a lot doing my portfolio... the next step is to do it in Angular :)

Collapse
 
allan2012 profile image
Allan Kibet

Be patient with the fundamentals.

Collapse
 
pablohs1986 profile image
Pablo Herrero

Yes, I suppose it is basic to have them clear. Thank you!!!