Developer Lessons Learned
- With the ability of AI and lack thereof, be the quality programmer who still cares about commit messages, PR descriptions, the code you ship, and always give your own thoughts in a code review.
- You, as a writer, must understand what you are passing off to a reader. Do not leave it up to the reader to try and decipher your code.
- Do not get bogged down in process.
- Explore other languages to see creativity in programming languages. Elixir, Standard ML, Lisp, then derive ideas to make your own interpreter or compiler.
- Have creative hobbies!
- If you're in web dev, it's worthwhile to go deeper than high level languages and web concept. Read fun things like this article on memory.
- Healthy teams differ in opinions and make room for arguments. Don't die on any hills though.
- In largs orgs, speak the same release language with Semver.
- If you have a team of juniors who have poor commit practices, start with good habits using something like Conventional Commits.
- Good PR reviewers will not block PRs due to nitpicks.
- Don't take PR reviews personally. They're great feedback and help you grow.
- 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.
- Setup observability with OTEL.
- A good software service requires optimizing, so make room for it in your roadmap.
- Use typed languages.
- Version APIs to help with 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, and don't stick them in all of the meetings.
- Code should be simple and easy to read. Learn how to name things. Do not write fancy code.
- Be independent with projects, reach out to other teams, and ask questions.