Little things I would teach to my younger software engineer self - #8 Avoid Churches

Looking back at the various stages of my career, I realized I could have learned some basic stuff way earlier than I did.

Even if I missed the original opportunity, all those little skills I acquired late served me tremendously well ever since.

This is a very generic one but a very important one. Technologies come and go, you don't know them all yet. And one day you'll realize that people are going full circle. Are you proponent of heavy clients or thin clients ? Look at how many times we flipped this switch ! Functional or Object oriented ? Interpreted or compiled ? Dynamically typed or not ?

DAAAAH, stop it. Once again, look at the big picture ! The answer is always "it depends".

A standpoint on a technology with no context doesn't mean much.

Assembly sucks never do that ? No, it makes sense if you are on a very slow embedded machine with 4KB of RAM with a simple instruction set and a strict performance requirement.

Once you have somebody arguing that a technology sucks, always ask, in what context. Even if the technologies are comparable: python vs ruby, availability of developers can be a factor, availability of some API bindings etc etc ...

If you have other ideas to send to your younger self programmer, feel free to add them in the comments !