The Need to Knows of Developers
I was talking to a friend the other day about what you need to know to be an effective developer. We touched on topics like source control, people skills, presentation skills and a ton of other skills that are inherent things that are need to know. Other things could include frameworks, good blog sites, or how to get what you’re asking for from your boss. After a while we got into the code aspect of being a developer. Where do you start? What is a waste of time to learn? When should I know what? Well, I certainly don’t know the best way but I’ll share the order that worked for me.
Let’s just start basic. The first thing you should know about developing for whatever it is you want to write code for is the syntax of the language you’ll be using. Start simple, think “Hello World”.
If you’re learning an Object Oriented language (like C#), your next stop should be The four pillars of Object Oriented Design
- Abstraction
- Polymorphism
- Inheritance
- Encapsulation
Once you have an understanding of the 4 pillars in my opinion your next stop should be learning the SOLID principles
- Single responsibility principle
- Open/closed principle
- Liskov substitution principle
- Interface substitution principle
Once you’ve gotten to principles you can start to make more maintainable code in larger projects.
Finally, once you’ve gotten those down it’d be best to look into the Gang of Four Design Patterns. These are proven patterns for enterprise scale production systems. If you have a good understanding of the problem you’re trying to solve, there’s a good chance a combination of these patterns will help you solve it.
All of this being said, there are problems you come across time and again as a developer. One of the biggest ones I face often is that of cross cutting concerns. I have this thing that does one thing, but now needs to do another. For example, you have data going into a database and you’d like to audit who put the record in with some sort of logging. In this case there are many solutions, and you could even write your own using all those spiffy patterns. Or in my case I found a great library called MediatR that implements a nice architecture solving that problem for me. Sometimes with the right amount of digging you’ll find a good library that solves the recurring problems.
Update
It is almost imperative now to know about cloud architecture for hightly available and scalable applications. I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a former colleague of mine who so happens to be a cloud architect at Microsoft. He pointed me toward his GitHub for some guidance on Microsoft Azure cloud architecture. You can see the repository on his GitHub here.
Happy coding!