I’m 7 months into my current job as a software engineer working primarily on the frontend. I have been coding for 2 years prior to getting my first full-time job. Over these years, I’ve learned different things ranging from coding patterns to programming concepts. Most of the things I learned have been super beneficial to me while some have been disastrous. Reflecting back, there are things I wish I knew while learning how to code and I’m gonna share them with you.

Quality over quantity

During my early days of learning programming, I had a misconception about what it means to be an effective engineer. My understanding at the time was that I had to write long blocks of if-else statements and do a lot of console.log on a daily basis. I was always super focused on building projects fast which led me to write a lot of bad code. This mentality also became evident when I joined a team in my current company: I would create PRs with a bad naming convention, duplicate code logic, typographical errors. Soon enough, I learned that it’s not always how fast you fix a problem, but how well you do.

Learn the fundamentals well

I was fortunate enough to meet with a lot of brilliant minds during my early days. I was part of different student developer communities so that meant I had access to a lot of vibrant, talented engineers. I would look at their portfolio and feel motivated to become the best. It felt like a competition, but a healthy one. I took some time to ask them individually how they became so good at programming and to my greatest surprise, they all had a common response: learn the fundamentals. Having fundamental knowledge about anything would definitely help solidify your understanding and give you more courage to learn other things.

Master browser developer tools

I can’t really explain how beneficial browser developer tools have been to me as a frontend engineer. It’s easily the best tool I would recommend you use for debugging anything that runs on the browser. Debugging is an important part of the software development process and knowing how to identify problems in less time is a skillset that will definitely improve your efficiency as an engineer.

Embrace testing as a culture

This is the holy grail of modern software craftmanship. Tests have literally saved my ass a lot of times. It’s a habit I wish I had embraced early on. Writing good tests allows you to think about problems from an entirely different perspective. It helps you build a lot more stable and reliable software. Adhere to this advice and trust me, you will have your future self to thank for doing so.