Ever wish you could go back and give advice to young yourself. Well, I bet most of you have in this article I’m going to discuss the five things I wish I had known before pursuing a software development career coming up. Following are a few things that I wish I knew before started coding.
1. Join Communities
Don’t be shy to reach out to the programming community at any point in time to learn new things, ask questions, and build relationships with your peers. The key thing is you want to talk about and having some sort of support around you. So then, you don’t feel alone when you’re studying. Here are a couple of ways that you can find people who are the same as us talk to people who are around you like mom’s friend’s daughter or your friend who graduate from college. You also have some friends studying computer science. So, just talk to people about your passion, and then maybe these people might know someone who’s also having the same struggle as you. You can go to some meetup groups there are a lot out there.
If you’re really really shy like me slack is a great way people are communicating through the slack outside of for Facebook interests. Moreover, YouTube is another good one. Apart from this, Instagram, it’s a big one you can just look through all these people with the same passion as you through hashtags it’s a big thing. You can also follow the hashtag in particular.
Following are a few ways that you can look through.
- Professionals around you.
- Meetup groups.
- Facebook intrests group.
- Faceboook events.
- Slack Channel Codenewbie.
2. Learn to Love Debugging
When you first start coding, if you get a lot of bugs, don’t fret! It’s completely normal and it doesn’t mean that you are not a good programmer.
What is debugging? Have you ever written code that you thought was perfect only to discover when you actually go and run it and it just doesn’t behave as you were expecting? Maybe the output isn’t quite correct or maybe in the interface when you click on a button nothing happens. Debugging helps you track down what your program is doing and identify what’s going wrong and ultimately fix the bug. So debugging are it’s a set of tools and techniques that you can use instead of run your program actually step through the program line by line and see how it’s behaving with the debugger.
You can see why if conditional was or was not taken for example you can see the values of all the variables in the program. So, You can even do something like evaluating an expression to see how it would be evaluated or what it would result in in the program’s current state Visual Studio code includes debugging support for your JavaScript and typescript out-of-the-box but you can also install extensions that add debugging support for Python Java and pretty much any other language.
You can think of debugging as something that’s really useful for everything from school assignments to it’s a technique that we use all the time while working on Visual Studio Code itself it helps us track down really difficult to find bugs and ultimately make Visual Studio code a more stable and more useful product for you it’s also probably a technique that you can integrate into your daily workflows as well.
3. Take your time and learn the 4, fundamentals well
My advice to a budding developer would be to pick one language and learn it well. Don’t be swayed by the hype in the community. Many times it’s influenced by people’s sentiments and not the market need.
4. Don’t be afraid to write bad code
You don’t have to write the perfect code on the first try. Instead, focus on solving the problem first. If you have the working solution, level up the game and improve your code.
5. Take care of your physical and mental health
Programming can be both mentally and physically exhausting. It’s important we strive to rest well. We will be surprised by how much proper night rest, can lead to a productive boost at work.
6. You will have imposter syndrome
Moments you feel like a fraud running out and soon to be figured out. It’s normal and happens to everyone.
7. You need to know more than one programming language
Programming languages are a tool in the toolbelt and depending on the scenario you need to choose either the hammer or the screwdriver. You will have to work with different languages in your career.
Do check other similar articles: How to earn money from programming? Must know these top 5 strategies, 7 useful tools for Web Development that every Developer needs.
