I like to not think of anything as “absolute” or “dealbreaker” (within reason. If there’s a culture of harassment I’m gone, for example). But spend intentional time throughout your career reflecting on what matters to you in terms of team culture, code culture, career growth opportunities, compensation, etc. There are a lot of factors to being happy in your work, and a lot of ways to get there. Be intentional about it, and try to always move toward it. It matters a lot more than whatever software you’re writing.
Understand programmatic approaches to testing, unit testing, test driven development (TDD), behavioral driven development (BDD), and integration tests.
Understanding TDD and practicing it as a new developer forces you to understand the end result wholly. It’s one thing to understand how to solve a problem, but understanding how to validate that the problem is solved programmatically, before you have implemented the solution makes you a better developer. It gives you a better view of what you are doing and will change you way of thinking about solving problems.
“Perfect” is the enemy of done. Sometimes you’ll get to 90% of a project and discover 20 ways you can refactor it. Sometimes you just need to ship code and not spend weeks tweaking it
!remind me 2 hours
