Over the 15+ years of my development career, I have learned several things that significantly increase my effectiveness. In this post, I share those learnings with you.

As a developer, writing code is fun with technical challenges but paying attention to the rest of the world is also a key point. The following are the key points.

When you run into something confusing or frustrating, re-position your mind: this obstacle is a learning opportunity: It's an opportunity to understand something new and grow. It sucks, and it feels bad, but soon after this you will be a better developer. And this will happen a lot—that's just the reality of being new to something.

Put a reasonable effort into making sure that you are solving the right problem.

Gather feedback early and often, typically by continuous delivery to real users which means Be Agile.

Your programming progress is not by the number of lines you coded but by how robust and maintainable the program you are writing is.

To quote Bill Gates: "Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."

Writing unit tests will not slow you down, I see junior developers very much focused on "getting things done" and they take writing unit tests as distractions.

Don't say my code worked and now don't care anything instead invest some time in refactoring code, applying use best practices, and writing unit test cases. In other words, if you make a mess, it will slow you down.

Do not ever think the project you are working on is the ONLY source for you to build your knowledge and expertise.

Often you think that "Inheritance for code reuse" when you are a junior developer. My advice does not to use Inheritance for code reuse at all when you are starting. It may not be the right call and you can harm the existing pattern and practice.

Write SOLID code rather than STUPID code

Self Review and Peer Review your pull request and important thing "Keep Your Ego Out of Code Reviews"

Copy-pasting big junk code in multiple places is another piece of advice for a junior developer, TRY to learn Don't Repeat yourself (DRY)

Try to write code that is a self-document and avoid having comments. Comments can be dangerous because a code is updated without modifying the comment updated. A new code can be added under the comment and the comment might get inaccurate in the first place.

Do Pair Programming whenever necessary

Tell-Don't-Ask-Tell-Don't-Ask is a principle that helps people remember that object orientation is about bundling data with the functions that operate on that data. It reminds us that rather than asking an object for data and acting on that data, we should instead tell an object what to do. This encourages moving behavior into an object to go with the data.

References

Thanks for reading!