An excellent Mastodon thread of advice to new developers

Will McGugan (the genius behind Textual, Rich and PyFilesystem) posted an excellent question to Mastodon earlier today (21 April 2024):

Developers over 40. What advice would you give to developers just starting their career?

The thread is filled with excellent advice. I particularly like this, modified here only to add some display-friendly markup:

1. There’s no such thing as too much testing.
2. You might come back to that code in 10–20 years. Don’t make future self hate current self.
3. When you think you’re going insane, you probably aren’t running the code you are editing. There are lots of ways for that to happen. https://www.tdda.info/why-code-rusts
4. Prototypes become production code.

This was my contribution:

• you are not your code - it’s easy to get wrapped up in your work to the point that code reviews and requests to make changes or fix bugs feel like personal attacks, where they’re just part of the job.

• The business doesn’t care about the tech - as you get involved with the non-tech side of the business you can overdo the technical explanation of description of “cool” aspects. The business just wants the problem solved.

• Your predecessors weren’t idiots - a link to this item from this site