0x20 Lessons Learned as a Professional Developer

I’ve been a professional software developer for about 6 years (three of those at Atomic Object!). During that time, I’ve learned some important things:

On Personal Growth

• What I know is way less interesting than what I don’t.
• The hard part of the project is knowing when I’m done.
• People problems are more important than technical problems.
• Sunshine, sleep, and water are important.
• There is such a thing as too much coffee.
• What I learn from mastering a weird language is useful even if I never use it on the job.
• I have biases I’m not aware of, and I will act on those biases.
• I had way more help getting to where I am than I think I did.
• It will take less time if you put the problem down right now and address it in the morning.
• It’s okay to play video games.
• Learn empathy.
• Learn to be wrong.

On Continued Education

• Learn how compression, networks, and cryptography work.
• Turing completeness is a trap.
• Software can’t solve most of the world’s problems.
• Master the fundamentals.
• I’m not going to like syntax I don’t understand just because it’s different. It’s important to learn the language before passing judgement on whether or not it’s suitable for my task.
• It can be hard to remember that concurrency and parallelism are different things.
• Threads aren’t hard. Shared state is hard.

On Running a Company

• Pay interns.
• Give interns a chance to fail.
• Don’t use interns as a cheap source of labor.
• Boring software is the best software.
• There’s not a good definition for “bad software”.
• It’s hard to talk about money.
• It’s important to talk about money.
• Guilt-free sick days are essential.
• Sometimes open-plan offices are great. Sometimes open-plan offices are the worst.
• If customers are billed hourly, employees should be paid hourly.
• It’s almost never worth it to sign, or asking someone to sign, a non-compete clause.
• Measuring people by their open source contributions favors people who have the resources and time to do so.
• Hiring is easy. Firing is not.

I wonder what I’ll be able to add to this list in the next 6 years.