OliverMensahDev

Student Developer Community: The Hidden Context for Building and Growing Your Skills as a Student

Disclaimer

This ebook has been published as a result of intensive efforts to provide students who would like to work in the software industry the guide towards developer community programmes. It is possible to find some mistakes in the content. Any mistakes found can be emailed to the author via [email protected].

About the Author

Oliver Mensah is a Software Developer with a lot of interests in developer community programmes. As a community-driven Software developer, he organizes, speaks and volunteers for developer community programs.

OliverMensahDev

The Skills Poor Programmers Lack

A friend and I had a discussion about the basic skills that are often lacking in experienced programmers. How can a programmer work for ten or twenty years and never learn to write good code? So often they need close supervision to ensure they go down the right path, and they can never be trusted to take technical leadership on larger tasks. It seems they are just good enough to get by in their job, but they never become effective.

We thought about our experiences and came up with three fundamental skills that we find are most often missing. Note that these are not skills which take a considerable amount of talent or unique insight. Nor are they "trends" or "frameworks" to help you get a new job. They are basic fundamentals which are prerequisites to being a successful programmer.

Understand how the language works

Programmers cannot write good code unless they understand what they are typing. At the most basic level, this means they need to understand the rules of

OliverMensahDev

Journey into writing code that is readable, understandable ,maintainable and testable as well as how to prepare codebase to embrace future changes.

I wonder from time to time whether I'm doing the right thing with respect to guidelines and principles when using an object-oriented programming approach to create application. I started reading Object Design Style Guide book last year to learn more about objects. And beginning this year, I decided to delve deeper into writing code that is readable, understandable and maintainable as well as how to prepare codebase to embrace future changes.

Here are the resources used:

Book

• Object Design Style Guide:
• Principles of Package Design

Pluralsight Courses

• Writing Readable and Maintainable Code

OliverMensahDev

<?php
//Not meant to be extended from.
final class Service
{
  //All properties are immutable

  private $properties;

  //All arguments are required. Don’t inject contextual information; make the service reusable. Dependencies are actual dependencies, not service locators.
  public function __construct($dependencies, $configurationValues)

OliverMensahDev

const students = [
  {
    name: 'Oliver Mensah',
    email: '[email protected]',
  },
  {
    name: 'Olivia Mansah',
    email: '[email protected]',
  },
];