“Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to error that counts.” - Nikki Giovanni
Everyone make mistakes and learn from it. However, it is also important to learn from others.
“Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” - Eleanor Roosevelt
My journey of becoming professional software developer started in 2007, and I have to admit that I have made mistakes throughout my career progression. A good thing is that I learnt from those errors. This series of posts is to highlight these mistakes as well as some of my observations when training fresh graduates. I hope this will help beginner and intermediate level developers, who are making their mark into the industry, to avoid repeating these mistakes.
The very first mistake that I am going to talk about is, Mistake #1 Code First Approach.
Programming is the process that takes an algorithm and put it into code that computer can understand and execute. We make use of programming languages to make this happen. In the growing world of technology inventions, you can literally automate any manual process.
A common mistake that I observed in an entry level programmer is that they don't work through the problem statement manually. This problem statement could be a programming assignment, developing a software application from scratch or adding a new feature to an existing software product. It is important that before you jump into coding, you need to make sure that you understand the requirements.
what sort of input will be required?
what is the expected outcome?
what will be the execution workflow?
There are dozens of other questions that should pop up in your mind. The very first step is to read and understand the problem statement and ask these questions to yourself, try figuring out answers to these.
You may get to the solution by simply jumping into the code, but remember it may take more iterations to the final solution. Using the right language construct is important, but it is more important that you have understood what you need to implement.
Looking forward to hear your observations on this topic.
Learning by making mistakes and not duplicating them is what life is about.
Keep learning!
Top comments (2)
Totally agree upon this.
During my first few years, I was always "eager to code". And used to have proud feeling only after doing some coding. Even though if it didn't had much outcome.
So that is where I used to do mistake. Whatever happens my target was to do maximum coding.
Eventually I realized that coding is just half part of the work. And other half contains the requirement gathering, understanding and communicating. And then coding is just a way to do implement things.
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