10 Things That I Wish Somebody Told Me When I Started As A Programmer

2 years back I started as a rookie and was anxious to enter the programming world, and there are several things that I wish someone had told me when I started this journey rather than finding out the hard way. Hope this article helps some of the new minds who are going to start their journey into the programming world.

Learn To Learn

Programming is an infinite world where new technologies emerge every day and we need to be updated with the market requirements to be of significance and you can’t go to institutions to learn these new technologies, but you need to learn how to learn them on your own and have hands-on practice. Keeping yourself updated with the programming world and gaining knowledge about the newly emerging technologies is very important for a fresher.

Choose Your Stream Wisely

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, knowing them is the main objective, and working on them to improve ourselves should be the end goal. There are many divisions in programming and we might be better at some more than the other. Knowing which stream you are good at is very important, because once you enter the job with one field it is very difficult to switch in between, so it will be good to choose the job which aligns with your strengths. For example there are fields like front-end, back-end, testing and, Devops in a typical application production, so I might be good at front-end and choosing a back-end job would be foolish for a fresher.

Learn from your team

Your team is your best coach. You can learn a lot just by looking at how they code. As a fresher never hesitate to ask doubts or questions though they might be silly, your teammates will definitely understand and help you out since you are new to everything. Communicate with them and learn from their code. Create knowledge sharing sessions regularly, this helped me a lot as a fresher.

Opensource is your bestfriend

I know that I told your team is your best coach but if you can’t rely on them all the time then opensource has your back. There is a lot of open-source code in GitHub and we can learn a lot about industry coding standards from it. So whenever you have spare time wander around those open source projects and even try contributing to them.

Don’t get attached to one programming language

A programming language is just a tool to solve the problem or build an application. The same programming language is not feasible in every scenario, so you might have to use different programming languages based on the use-case, so expand your horizons and be open to learn new programming languages and don’t get attached to a single one. Learn to determine which technology fits the given use-case and pick that accordingly.

Test your code

Testing is the most underrated thing in the programming world. It’s the most important, so never neglect it. You haven’t coded unless you’ve tested it. Make it a practice to write unit test cases and try to cover all edge cases that you might think of. You’ll be surprised to know how many cases you’ve left unhandled. You should notice them and fix them before someone else points it out. So always test your code.

Don’t Procrastinate

This is a general rule that applies everywhere not just in programming. We tend to take up tasks at the last minute and try to finish them in a hurry which might result in bad quality code. Plan efficiently and code accordingly so that you can test every edge case and produce quality code. Account time for unexpected errors or bugs, you never know what might go wrong, so be cautious when committing to deadlines.

Use your IDE’s full potential

Every IDE has many cool features that make your life easy while coding. So explore all the shortcuts and options that your IDE provides rather than doing them manually. You’ll love to code when things happen faster and customize your IDE to your liking, may it be color, customizations, fonts, formatters, code intelligence. IDE customization also makes it fun to code.

Understand concepts behind the programming language

Learn how the programming language is built and how it executes code, it helps a lot to connect the dots why you are getting certain errors/bugs. Sticking to one way of coding is really bad. Object-oriented isn’t the only way to solve a problem, there is something called functional programming, procedural, and even logical programming so explore out of your comfort zone, or else it is difficult to survive in the long run. Moreover having total control over your coding environment is important, to have that you need to know how your programming language behaves. So learn how objects are created, how the code is compiled or executed, and how it utilizes memory.

Maintain code quality

Code quality covers a huge set, working code is good but if the code is shitty then it’s of no use. Quality signifies many things, like code readability, indentation, no console.logs or system.outs, use proper logging, naming conventions, and a lot more. These determine what type of code you are, so don’t just focus on output, quality is equally important. People should understand what your code is trying to achieve just by looking at it.

I have learned a lot more things over these 2 years and these are some of the basic stuff which I felt are of most importance and wish that someone had told me before my journey. I love coding as it is a predictable universe that works based on a fixed set of rules and you define them, so it’s really fun.

Hope you liked the article, if you find this article helpful, please drop some claps and feel free to share the article.

Peace!