Today we’re going to talk about four truths that every software developer.
Number One:
Don’t just limit yourself to the current project. So, I know you’re going to be given this big project at work. You might be stressed out about it, but make sure that that’s not the only thing that you’re writing software on. You always want to make sure that you’re always innovating. You want to make sure that you have it always have a little side project that you’re working on. Always have something to continue to innovate, and to continue to push yourself, and that goes with reading new projects. Always be reading. Be reading have your favorite news sources have your favorite updates from whatever technology stack you’re working on. Make sure you’re always reading and always innovating.
Next, do hackathons regularly as part of this always innovating right because you don’t want to just work on just the current projects you have at work. You want to be able to have these little side projects and sometimes you don’t really know of them or you don’t have a good team or you don’t have a great venue to do this in, so that’s where a great hackathon comes along. So, some companies offer hackathons inside of their own company. Some companies, there’s always opportunities for hackathons out there. So, join into a hackathon. They’re really fun. They get you out of the box and they can really help you to drive forward and to continue to learn to innovate.
Number Two:
A good programmer is a lazy programmer. Now, this may seem counterintuitive because you want somebody who works hard, it’s always grinding, but actually, I like the lazy programmers. So why do I like the lazy programmer? Because a good developer is going to spend 60 minutes to develop software or write code to automate a process that would have only taken them 10 minutes. Now it may sound silly, but again it comes from a mindset. A lazy programmer is somebody who is always going to err on the side of automation first, and you really want that programmer because that’s the guy who’s also in their code likely going to have the most efficient code. So, generally speaking, a lazy programmer is a good programmer.
The next reason that a lazy programmer is a good programmer is because they’ll spend time to write good harnesses or good tools to make running your code easier. Now, I’ve seen people who just bang through and then they’re working really hard. And again, this isn’t where the hardest working program resolves the best, the lazy one is because they’re going to write good tools to make them more efficient. They may spend an hour at the beginning of the project writing a tool that’s going to help them to automate this project. You’re going to end up with it is something that’s easier to run, something that’s easier to debug, and then have this great test harness that they may even be able to use over and over and over again. So, that’s why a lazy programmer is a good programmer, and that’s why here at Startuphakk we like to teach programmers how to be most efficient in their code. And it’s the reason we teach on the .NET stack because it’s the platform that comes with the best tools in my opinion.
Now, another reason that a lazy programmer is a good programmer is because they write good automated testing so that you can know when stuff broke. If you have a good set of automated testing, you’re not going to spend a bunch of time manually having to test this so spending that time to automated test it is going to flush out any bugs that you’re going to have in your code and you’re going to know that’s a solid piece of code.
Number Three:
You don’t need to know everything. This is something I actually teach junior developers, and something I stress when I teach in the course. Very frequently, learn a principle, learn how it works, know that thing, but don’t memorize all the syntax and everything. That’s what Google’s for. You don’t need to retain all of this up here. You want to be able to learn as broad as you can, instead of as deep as you can. By learning broad, you’re going to learn concepts, technologies, and what they do. Then you’ll be able to jump into them or go back to them, or even go back to the course that we taught you. Because we’ve taught you in these great courses, you’ll have access to them for the rest of your life. So, you’ll be able to go back to those courses and those code samples, and look at how you did it before, and that’s the whole point. Don’t memorize that stuff, learn it, get the principles, and then go to the next thing, because you’ve always got Google, you’ve got Stack Overflow, you’ve got GitHub, you’ve got our coding samples, you’ve got instructors, you’ve got senior developers, you’ve got all this great stuff. Learn the principles, get as much knowledge as you can, as broad as you can, but don’t go around memorizing syntax.
This is something that I stress over and over again, especially with new developers. You don’t need to know everything, and so in some cases, another aspect of this is you don’t need to know everything because you may find that you don’t really like doing front-end development, and so you may spend your whole career doing back-end and database development or doing APIs, and that’s okay. And so that’s part of the reason why you don’t need to know everything too, because you may really specialize into one thing. I’ve known a lot of people who have learned a certain particular set of integrations and work with integrations with .NET, and then they’ve done that for their whole career. So, this is a really important thing. Make sure you don’t memorize everything, learn what you need to know and kick out the rest. There’s only so much room up here, at least for me, and so I like to make sure I really focus on those things that I absolutely need to know, and then that way, if I need to know the other stuff later, I can always look it up.
Number Four:
Better not perfect. I think I’ve talked about this in videos before, I’ll talk about it in videos again, I’ll keep talking about it. If you keep trying to hit perfection, you will never get there and you will lose. And you will spend way too much time on projects. Get the best thing that you can with the time that you have allotted, and then from there you can always go back and iterate. Learn about being truly agile. So, you want to develop, release to someone or somewhere, and sometimes that’s just a test to a test environment, but then you want to be able to do that. Learn, once you release this, learn from it, and then iterate. Don’t get stuck on trying to make something the best. If you do this every time, and every developer knows this, every time you go back and rewrite another piece of code, it’s better. But, so in theory, you could rewrite that piece of Code 10 times and it’s going to get better every time, and there’s no doubt about that. But, that being said, we don’t get the chance to write code 10 times. Your boss, like me, is still gonna be out there saying, hey, we need to get this stuff to Pride. I used to have a development manager who used to tell us, code belongs in production.
Now, I’m a big believer in this, because the reason why is you get something out to a customer, to if you’re coding for an Enterprise, get it out of the cusp, get it out, get into their hands, learn from it, and then from there you can iterate and continuing to be agile. That’s really the true definition of agile. Everyone else thinks agile means Kanban or Scrum or one of these other methodologies, that’s a whole different conversation. I’m talking about the true definition of being agile. Get something, get it into the hands of the user, learn about it, and then iterate, and do that over and over again, version, version. Keep iterating on it, so you can do to improve it. And this is why I’m a big believer in Better not perfect. And that’s why here at Startuphakk, we try to get you into writing production code as fast as possible. We’re going to teach you the bare minimum that you’re going to need to know, so you can dig in and start writing code. Because at the end of the day, when you start writing that code, you’re going to learn more about yourself and about this industry than we could possibly teach you.
So that’s why we try to get you through as quick as we can with absolutely minimum knowledge. But then also allow you to have tutors to be able to help you transition into your new job. And this is a huge win for you. So, Better not perfect, and these are the big four things. So hopefully, I’ve said something that has helped you or that you’ve agreed with. If not, leave a comment down below. And as I said before, we’re giving away a free set of tuition this month. So make sure you go down and hit the link down below, enter in your information, and you can enter to win the free tuition this month. But as always, if you’re ready to start, don’t wait, get started today. Go to Startuphakk.com, and we’ll get you started on the best career possible as a software developer.
StartupHakk:
Whether it’s doing some specialized business process. We specialize in taking these specialists in their field and teaching them how to develop and teaching them to become a full stack developer and in the process. What you’re going to get with that is you will get somebody who can become a full stack developer while still being a specialist in their field and this is ultimately going to be, we feel, one of the best hybrids and really be the best benefit for a corporate world who can work with getting these specialized people to work as a developer and then that’s gonna ultimately help them to be really good in their field and I think this is one of the specialties that we’re going to really be working so make sure you check out startuphakk.
This is a great opportunity that we’re just starting out to kick off our coding boot camp so that you can take someone who’s a specialist in your field, teach them to be a developer and then begin to build and learn all of these most important skills that you get. So make sure to check out https://www.startuphakk.com/.
