10 things I learned in my first year as a software engineer

Written by Julia GrabosSoftware Engineer, Tines

Published on October 29, 2021

This article was posted more than 18 months ago.

After just over a year in the industry, I wanted to reflect on my experience and the things I learned that helped me on my continuous journey to becoming an effective software engineer. To achieve this I put together a number of guidelines I learned (mostly the hard way) that helped me to ensure I produce solid quality code and continue to develop my skills.

1. Code readability over over-optimisations 📖 

One of the first things you learn when working in a team is the value of clean and readable code. Remember all those times you returned to a piece of code you wrote a few weeks earlier and had no idea what was going on? That is how another teammate feels every time they read a piece of your code that is not written in a readable and clean way. Sure it might have the best runtime possible, but what good is that when a bug is detected, needs patching and they simply cannot wrap their head around what you were thinking when you wrote the code? Even worse, they try to patch the ugly code by adding even more ugly code, supporting the broken window theory.

A good heuristic in this space is: if the code is complex, add a quick comment indicating the intention, someone (or even yourself) will thank you later and you avoid the risk of broken windows. Better yet, if you can write it such that no comment is needed, do it!

2. The importance of small increme