5 mistakes I have made as a software developer

From time to time it's good to look back and reflect about the past. Maybe you can learn something from it or you don't have anything better to do while waiting to board the aircraft. In this post I list five mistakes I made as a software developer so far in my career.

1. Hurry to get a job

I started working late in my university years, in the beginning took a part time job and in the last one and half years landed full time jobs. I sort of regret this, because it "forced" not to attend the most difficult subjects or subjects with extensive lab hours. Looking back some of the them were really interesting and would have helped me advance faster in my software development career after all.

Not attending university at all and instead learning by myself (which I would do now), it's a topic for another post.

2. Don't work as a software developer

For some years, though I worked in the IT industry, was not in software development - my CV is public online on LinkedIn.

Don't get me wrong, I loved those jobs and met very interesting people, many which I remained friends to, but this blog post is about software development and if you want to excel at a craft you need to practice this art as much as you can.

3. Neglect my family

There were times when I worked on side projects taking away family time.

Back when I wrote about Story of Podcastpedia.org I even thought multi-tasking was fine:

It's not fine, better focus on one thing only and focus well. You and your kids need your full attention.

So my new motto when working on side projects is "family first", or do pair programming with them:

"Software becomes legacy with next line of code, love is forever."

4. Don't write clean code

I care more about the code I write now. I try to make it easy to understand and maintain. That was not always the case.

I also believe that README is one of the most important files in a project.

5. Don't organise my dev bookmarks in an easy way

There are lots of good dev resources I used once and needed again later but were hard to find. Or bookmarked in that browser and in the next browser and so on.

But that's not the case anymore. I took the matter in my own hands and developed a Bookmark Manager with Developers & Co in mind - www.bookmarks.dev, to help me save time and nerves.

Conclusion

We can't change the past, and even if we could I wouldn't change anything.

What were your mistakes in your software development career so far? Leave a comment below! We might learn from it...