What I wish I had known when starting my development career
This is a guest post from Jamie Tanna. Enjoy. Dear new developer, Our jobs and lives are full of repetition, and one of the beauties of being developers is that we can take steps to automate away some of the repetition. Learning to automate, or at least minimise, repetition optimises your work. You can get … Continue reading Learn how to build tools
Dear new developer, If you interact with web APIs at your job, learning curl is a good investment. Curl is a flexible, powerful, command line utility which lets you make HTTP requests. In my current job, I build a lot of API requests. Side note: I'm going to use the shorthand API for web based, … Continue reading Learn curl
Dear new developer, I wrote a post about learning SQL a while back. I posted the link in Lobste.rs, an online community, which generated some interesting comments. One of them was that sqlite was a better way to learn SQL than using PostgreSQL or MySQL. This is due to the fact that there are some … Continue reading Learn SQL with sqlite
Dear new developer, It's a good idea to learn SQL (which stands for structured query language). This is the language that the vast majority of data is stored in for most companies. The reason for this is that relational databases (which is what SQL is the main interface for) are very good at a wide … Continue reading Learn SQL
Dear new developer, Use copy and paste as much as you can. Not so much for code snippets from Stackoverflow, though that will save you some time hunting down mismatched parentheses. But this is especially useful whenever you are searching for errors or moving information between systems. For example, recently I had to find where … Continue reading Use copy/paste as much as you can
Dear new developer, You are probably going to be dealing with text files sometime during your development career. These could be plain text, csv, or json. They may have data you want to get out, or log files you want to examine. You may be transforming from one format to another. Now, if this is … Continue reading Learn a little jq, awk and sed
Dear new developer, Don't be penny wise, pound foolish. Your time is worth a lot, and it's worthwhile to spend some money to accelerate toward your goals. I heard a client say once that their time was essentially free. I understood the sentiment, but the reality is that if you can be working on tasks … Continue reading Trade Money For Time
Dear new developer, Reading the docs is so important. It is so easy, when you are confronted with a task, to just jump in and start doing. It feels right. It feels natural. It feels like progress. The problem is that it may be motion, but it probably is not progress. You may be spinning … Continue reading Read the documentation
Dear new developer, When you are fixing a bug in a program you are working on, a key thing to do is to get an understanding of the state of the system. This can include user input, stored values from a persistent data store, and non recurring information like the current time. But the most … Continue reading Learn to use a debugger
Dear new developer, It's paradoxical, but sometimes the best thing you can do is not write code. Remember, the value you provide is to solve the problem you are faced with (the outcome), not to write code. Custom code has value, but comes with costs. It needs to be deployed, maintained and upgraded. It has … Continue reading The best code is no code
Letters To A New Developer 