Joel’s advice for college students:
- Learn how to write before graduating.
- Learn C before graduating.
- …
- …
- Take programming-intensive courses.
- …
Excellent advice if you aspire to become a great software developer. Required reading. There’s one thing missing:
Focus on the basics – Everyday
Work on improving your code thus making it easier to maintain. Work hard on seemingly trivial things like naming functions, cohesion, simple design, testing. Everyday.
At the end of the day, nobody cares if you came up with a brilliant, incomprehensible algorithmn revolutionizing computer science. At the end of the day, what matters is that the code you wrote works and can be changed easily – tomorrow morning. It will be changed, trust me.