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Discussion on: I have been a professional developer for 31 years and I'm 53 now, Ask Me Anything!

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ashishgoyal247 profile image
Ashish Goyal • Edited

What are the common mistakes done by developers early in their career? I have just started with development how can I learn efficiently? Most of the time I get stuck due to bugs....How can I avoid that?

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johnmunsch profile image
John Munsch

I don't know if it's what you're looking for, but I consider it a common mistake to take your work home with you. So many people never seem to have developed the habit of stopping work at the end of the day and putting it out of their mind. I don't think it's a good idea to work late hours, weekends, or fret about your job outside of work hours. If you want to devote time to coding still, do so, but pick a project of your own.

As for learning efficiently. I find videos work well for me to give me a quick intro to something (either on YouTube, commercial like Wes Bos, or a service like egghead.io) and then I just have to build to learn. For me there's no substitute for using a given library/language/framework.

I still get stuck on bugs, though I've developed a lot of expertise in how to find them so I can often get unstuck faster :) You don't say what language/environment you use, but in my case for example, every minute spent learning about what the Chrome and Firefox Dev Tools can do is a minute well spent because it ends up saving me 20 more minutes at some point later.