Month: May 2016

You have just spent the last few month going through that awesome course learning all the basics of coding. You can now write scripts that can automate almost anything your mind or your clients mind can conceive. But the desire to continue learning is strong so now what next?

All to be great developers will be at this position at one point in their life. Yearning to get in more technical knowledge but diving into advanced materials almost certainly takes you to theory or project management. Not fun things, at least not for now.

Thankfully for you at this stage there is still a lot more to learn.

Coding styles

Most languages and particularly the open source ones are quite laissez faire when it comes to their attitude on how you style your code. When working with a team, individual style adds complexity to the codebase rapidly degrading its quality.

Thankfully most languages do have a coding guideline. Learning the one for your language will be a good investment for your career.

See the entry Name well or go home for more details on style.

It’s all in the data

Not all the fancy syntax in the world can hide the fundamental truth that programming is just manipulating data. It will serve you well in the future to get your relationship with data right.

Learn concepts related to:

1. Data types and why they matter (Integers, Floating-point, Booleans etc)
2. Data structures and how they affect performance (Linked lists, Stacks, Queues etc)
3. Primitive Data structures (arrays, dictionaries, lists) This are important to optimize your code in your language of choice
4. Databases. There is an amazing array of database systems in the market, it is worthwhile to explore them and their unique offerings

Code flow

In writing your code, your primary imperative is to reduce complexity, see Heart of software engineering.

To do this you may need to learn tools and techniques that can help you refactor your code to make it easier to read.

Some of the most popular principles relate to:

1. Recursive procedures
2. Functional programming
3. Algorithms
4. Conditionals. Some programming languages offer a rich variety of expressing conditional flows
5. Literate programming

Error detection and Exception handling

By its very nature, code is complex and not amenable to intuitive thought. As such you can expect that your code will contain errors. That by itself is not a problem, the challenge is how do you keep the system running even when such exceptions exist?

All modern languages offer some sort of run time exception handling. Make generous use of asserts in your code and your weekends will be peaceful!

Learning defensive programming is definitely an investment to consider at this point.

Automated Testing

Writing code is easy, changing existing code is a nightmare. You can prepare for the eventual scenario in which you have to change your code by baking in automated tests.

Automated tests should be FIRST

• F – Fast. If you have to wait more than a few seconds for the tests to run, you will likely not use them very much
• I – Isolated. To ensure you can quickly narrow in on the problem
• R – Repeatable. Running your test should not change state of the application. That way you can run it many times
• S – Self validating. Tests need to only give a binary yes/no.
• T – Timely. Don’t say you will write the test code later. That never happens

Tools of the trade

A good carpenter would have no problems differentiating between a Socket, Allen or Pipe wrench. As an upcoming developer you should familiarize yourself with the various tools that you will be using on your day to day job.

• IDEs (Netbeans, IntelliJ, Pycharm)
• Text editors (Sublime, ViM, Emacs)
• Source code control (Git, Mercurial, Subversion) actually maybe you just need to know git!
• Team collaboration (Slack, Gitter, Confluence)
• Project management (Trello, Podio, Asana)
• Code repositories(Packagist, Pypi)

Your community

Coding is often associated with lonely hours in front of the screen. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Unless you are in a very remote area, there is likely a meeting of like minded individuals going on regularly near you.

Attend this events with fervour. The benefits are amazing. Apart from the chance to discuss your ideas with a human being who understands what you are saying, you grow your network which will pay off in opportunities later on.

That should provide you with some fodder for your hungry brain to chew on.

Tell me about your experience on my twitter @jchex or in the comment section below.

It is that time of the year again, performance reviews!. For team leads this is usually a stressful time especially if in your work environment you have different tiers of developers and even worse the tiers are attached different hourly rates. Think Junior, Intermediate, Senior with hourly of 25,35,60.

In this environment a good number of developers will want to rise up the ranks, how do you know who is deserving? What I present here are some behavior changes that are bound to happen as developers mature in their craft. Watch out for them and reward the deserving.

Under promise, over deliver

The mark of a new developer is enthusiasm. Don’t dare kill that energy, it is what the dev will need to survive the perils of learning programming.

When you ask them if they can do it, the answer will always be a solid YES and of course it can be done in a week, it’s just a payment module right? For Project Managers out there you know it never takes a week.

As they mature you will begin to note a tendency for more careful evaluation. The developer will scarcely commit to features or schedules without first doing some research. Even then, what they will commit to will rather be tame. Yet you know they will deliver. What actually happens is that they more than deliver, they delight.

No longer gurus

While the junior developers know that esoteric language feature, they will not likely understand the basics of a programming paradigm other than the one they live in.

The senior likely knew of that feature a long time ago but years of disuse may have pushed it to the edge of the mind or even forgotten. Their code uses common features arranged in simple ways. They have understanding of trade-offs they are making by working with their current paradigm.

No superheroes here

It takes a special kind of person to wrestle with the machine hour after hour chasing down bugs and solving hard problems late into the night. The skills of the junior are just what is needed to do just that. The junior will boast of the number of commits made and their 365 day streak on github.

It is natural to expect that the senior will have now mastered how to even double the time spent on this coding marathons. Yet what you find is that the seniors are actually, for a lack of a better word, boring. They may not even seem to be working that hard!

Yet results come in steady.

Beyond the keyboard

The junior is actually proud of their poor social skills. They will brag of being the smartest kid in the room. Their super human typing skill is the hallmark of their achievement.

A senior on the other hand will have a rich tapestry of skills extending from coding, user experience, design, project management and mostly important people skills.

Ian Landsman goes so far as to proclaim code is only 5% of the business 10 tips for moving from programmer to entrepreneur

Visibility

I will be done when am done if there is ever a defining quality of a junior developer, that is it! The mindset of the junior is grounded on big revelations. They will work tirelessly and at the end unveil this great product which everyone will love and they will be the king of the world.

When working with seniors, you will quickly realize they hold no such delusions of grandeur. They understand for most part that the way to build a great product is to discover what that great product is. You will have great visibility as the project goes on and even better opportunities to provide feedback.

Obviously this is not a comprehensive view of what makes a great senior developer, how has the experience been in your own organization? Get in touch with me on the comment section below or on my twitter [@jchex](https://twitter.com/jchex)