Dear new developer,
This post covers some great tips on getting through your first year. It starts off ominously:
The first year as a programmer is one of the most frustrating things a homo sapien can experience. You’re thrust from the world of ambiguous human communication into the icy waters of cold, hard correctness. There is no compromise with the machine. It does exactly what you tell it to, no more, no less.
But then moves to some good advice, about advice:
There are very few absolutes when it comes to practical programming. A Technical opinions of developers are based on their experiences, the books they’ve read and the technologies they happened to work with. No one does a thorough survey of the technology landscape before declaring their support for a given tool, application or methodology.
This is so true. Everyone’s opinion is path dependent. I was a MySQL user for years and thought it was the best open source database, until a chance comment from someone I was chatting with at a meetup (see, you should attend a meetup) mentioned that PostgreSQL has transactional DDL. That is, you can alter a table as part of a transaction, and they roll it back. (Happy to report that MySQL has made progress on this, though I don’t believe they are at feature parity yet.) If I hadn’t run into that meetup participant, it is unlikely I would have learned that nuance.
Multiply that experience by the hundreds of decisions a developer makes every year based on their knowledge, their problem space and their work environment and you can see how different advice can be. And to be fair, how it can all be valid, based on context.
The post also covers ego-less coding, what to learn, and the joy of bug hunting. The whole post, “Survive your first year as a programmer”, is worth a read.
Sincerely,
Dan
Letters To A New Developer 