Hello world
After 4 years of building and maintaining software products, I decided to share a list of stuffs I would like to have known at the time I started programming ^^

1. Working on a new project / feature / technology ? Start with the WHY.. not the HOW

At the beginning I was 1000% motivated to try so many stuff ( I am still though ), but was too focused on the HOW part..

How can I use Angular to develop that website ?
How can I implement that feature ?

Doing so made me only feel like a robot whose mission is to "deliver".

But bruh, delivery is the only goal -> that's how I get my salary at the end of the month

I know but wait
would going like that be fun in long-term ?

So what if I instead put myself in the POV of the client. Starting with "Why do we need that feature?"
That may trigger a new conversation/debate like:

Client: we need that in order to have more visibility on our products

Dev: Hm ok I get it, that feature will take 2 weeks to dev. Also what about adding an email marketing + notifications ?

Client: sounds cool ;) let's brainstorm that during our next planning

2. Everyone can mentor

Mentoring is not about only sharing knowledge to the other, but I also learned a lot in the process.

That helps the team to have common ground process and participates in a better team cohesion.
That has contributed to break my shyness too

3. Stop losing code

Yep -> several times during my seasons at the university, I "lost" codes due to a folder deleted or a saved file without history ( so not able to recover old versions ).

Hoya..what if you could go back on time ?

I would have included Git in my main tools.
It allows us to commit / push my codes into the "cloud" and keep track of my changes ( no more code lost )

Git is my everyday bae ..Git may be your bae too

4. More emphasis on tests

Old process: I develop a feature to add items to cart in an e-commerce website.
Let's deploy my changes to the preprod environment.
Waiting for the QA to test...

Two days later:

QA team : Mayday mayday the app has crashed
Me: sorry we were counting on you to test all possibilities in that new functionalities :( we're gonna fix and deploy for you to test
QA team : are you for real ?

Next-gen process: Write tests ^^
Let us not depend on a QA team to test all our code..we are not only developper but first of all -> OWNERS of the project.

Indeed but what is the solution ?

I would like to have known the importance of tests at the beginning to avoid wasting time testing manually each features.

Check out that interesting article on Unit Tests: https://dev.to/codingpizza/what-is-a-unit-test-1e1m

A small snapshot showing green tests ( using Jest ) here before committing my code

Conclusion

we are all learning, I missed a lot of stuff but doing errors is just a part of the process ;)

What would you want your younger self to have known several years ago ?

Peace and stay tuned for the part 2