10 Things I Wish I Knew Earlier in my Career as a Programmer
These could help fast-track your career
It’s hard for me to believe, but I’ve been programming for about half of my life. Along the way, I’ve learned things through experience that I wish I could have learned faster.
The best programmers are way more than good coders. As such, this list doesn’t include any technical advice. Rather, it breaks myths and preaches self-development.
Here are 10 things I wish I had known earlier in my career:
1. Don’t worry about learning languages
Even if job descriptions ask for tons of experience in languages, the best programmers aren’t those that have perfected a language or knows the ins and outs of many languages. The best programmers are those who can solve problems.
2. Ditch perfection
To go from junior to mid-level and beyond, keep solving problems. It doesn’t matter if you come up with the best solution or not, as long as it works well enough.
3. Be lazy
Apply the DRY method (Don’t Repeat Yourself). If you find yourself copy+pasting code, there’s a good chance you’re doing it wrong. Create better abstractions. The better your abstractions, the more you improve as a programmer.
4. Focus on problem-solving
The more you solve problems, the more the patterns become clear. Then you apply those patterns to new problems and solve them faster and better. That’s how a true professional programmer can jump on any language and still perform. Keywords and syntax can be Googled.
5. Google everything you’re unsure of
To this day, I still Google how to do simple things like loops and substrings when I use a language I haven’t used in months or years. I’m not ashamed of it. Our brains have limited capacity for retaining information, I’d rather remember things I can’t retrieve later on. Really, there’s no point memorizing something you’ll do only once or twice during your work year.
However, there is value in learning how best to find the information you’re…
