Developer Lessons Learned
- Disagree and commit.
- In a larger organization with shared libraries, it's helpful to have everyone speaking the same language, especially with releases. Use Semver.
- I don't love it, however, when many developers have poor commit practices, help with good habits using something like Conventional Commits. Though you may squash commits as part of a PR, it is nonetheless good practice to have readable commit messages. It may save your ass in the future.
- Don't block PRs due to nitpicks.
- Don't take PR reviews personally. They're great feedback and help you grow.
- Funny enough, devs want silos for job security, however, Senior+ try to prevent silos.
- A good mentor may never come. Enjoy learning and you'll discover the right way to do things along the way.
- Unless you own the product and really care, you will only have two of: features, speed, and quality.
- The language you choose to write in can dictate how well you code. If you're in JavaScript all day, you will not be a great developer, and you're missing out on a lot of interesting language features.
- Setup great observability.
- Measure before optimizing.
- Use typed languages.
- Version APIs.
- Try not to create breaking changes.
- E2E tests and integration tests are the important ones.
- Composition over inheritance.
- As a manager, make the most use of your best developers. The best want more than writing APIs.
- Code should be simple and easy to read. Learn how to name things. Do not write fancy code.
- Accept that not all dependencies are mapped out in the beginning of a big project.