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Ah, the little subtle things we have to iron out as we progress from Junior Developer to Medior Developer.. things like:

- knowing the difference between a carriage return and a line feed (although having worked with analog typewriters helps) and later knowing that Unix-based systems and Windows NT-based systems implement it differently..

- knowing that serialization is important because not all computers interpret data the same way and some computers allocate 4 Bytes for a construct, others 16 Bytes.. and then we get the funkiness of transferring character sets between machines..

- knowing that a whitespace character is not only an actual space (as is known in ASCII as code 32). This one can cause even medior developers a headache, as in: why the fuck does this string function say that "hello I am a duck" and "hello I am a duck" are not the same?! Turns out then in the debugger that when you expand every character in the string you see that string1 contains 32 32 32 32 as usual.. but then string2 contains -96 -96 -96 -96 and you're like.. what the fuck..? Then you know you have to throw \\h regex at it. Haha.

- finalizing our objects and streams (although modern languages do that for us).. otherwise we have to do funky shit like trying to find what's locking a file, which is not so easy to figure out.

- figuring out why something won't work often requires you to not only break down the problem in smaller steps, to use a debugger, but sometimes it's even better to just create a proof of concept, slap some minimal code in there and debug that.. much easier.

- etc.

:)

Comments
  • 0
    the one with the "PoC debug". Yes.

    Copied exact code from normal application, worked as intended. So something was introducing side-effects, so I know the mistake wasn't in that piece of code.
  • 1
    That kind of stuff should have been learned and understood even before becoming a Junior
  • 1
    @don-rager Captain elitist, innit. That's why even medior and senior devs struggle with it.
  • 3
    @don-rager Juniors are that for a reason. They don't have much experience with all of these yet.
  • 0
    @don-rager What are you before becoming a junior? I mean, you got to start somewhere
  • 1
    @Katakompe the Term junior is confusing technical ability with technical experience. That kind of stuff ist usually learnt in college and devs that already have those abilities are still hired as Juniors
  • 0
    @don-rager It's taught in college but all the other courses overloaded my brain and I ended up forgetting those details. I'm in a re-learning phase now.
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