Comment by Marco Alka on "As web developers, front and back end, what 5 things do you know now, which you wished you knew when starting out?"

CommentAs web developers, front and back end, what 5 things do you know now, which you wished you knew when starting out?

Marco Alka

Software Engineer, Technical Consultant & Mentor

Apr 18, 2017

How to CSS (even professionals of many years often don't know about CSS architecture and there are sometimes no standards in place, which makes working on old or big projects really hard)
How to estimate the time needed for a project
Plan first, then code (a whiteboard or even just a piece of paper can do wonders)
Documentation is important (then, I didn't know, but today, I am just lazy :D)
Split problems into smaller, easier to solve chunks

Mev-Rael

Executive Product Leader & Mentor for High-End Influencers and Brands @ mevrael.com

Apr 20, 2017

Same problem with docs and laziness. I invented a win-win solution. Practice what I call a documentation driven development and usually some bigger comments with examples at the top of some files are very helpful. Nobody needs your 100 pages of docs, when I work with specific file I just wanna know only a bit about that specific file. Also from my legal writing experience - always put any related comments in the doc, it is easier to look onto one paper where everything is mentioned instead of looking on paper with blind references to many other documents. You waste focus and time finding and opening them. Just make everything short and in one place. Same about documenting your DB migrations, schemas. What is this for column, how it is used and when.

TDD is a good helper with the documentation cause. It's actually documentation that executes (: ~ the tests are the consolidation of your specs. If you change something that conflicts with a previously set rule, the tests will warn you. Try it out, you won't regret.

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