As a young developer, I would find it useful to get some advice regarding things to think about in order to develop a high-quality application. In my college courses, most teachers emphasized input validation and some talked about security concerns, but no one covered the importance of certain other things, like logging for example.
What are some mistakes that inexperienced developers tend to make which could lead to frustration for more experienced developers?
I find the main thing new developers forget is that in the real world they are often working as part of a team. This shows itself as..
That's not to say their code isn't up to scratch in isolation, but they aren't working in isolation anymore.
On pretty much every platform, you'll have to deal with:
In my experience, the one thing nearly all inexperienced developers fail to bear in mind is that you're (almost always) working in a commercial environment. Your code has to be good, but not perfect. The most important thing is not perfection, it's that your code ships.
Put another way, delivering the perfect piece of code three months after your company has gone bust is no good to anyone.
In my opinion, this is one of the most significant ways in which development in the real world differs from development as taught at university.
Really broad question; to answer in detail is ...multiple books.
Here's a general systems-definition checklist to get you started -
The clean decoupling of the system on one's development machine, and the target machine, so that one does not end up with "Well, it works on my machine" situations.
And how quickly can you reconstruct your development machine?
I think its probably design - ie the approach of thinking about what you're going to do before you do it.
Too many inexperienced coders (remember when you first started) like to jump in and get something going, then add a bit more and ad a bit more and add a bit more. This approach can work if you've planned to do it that way (each bit can be tested as you go after all), but most inexperienced coders only focus on the part they're writing.. so all the additions tend to be hacked in on top. And we've all seen code that's evolved like that!
Organization is the next thing, often they're too focused on the code they've written to remember how they did it, and what was required. So they forget to bundle or document a dependency that's required. They also tend to put things where they fall, I had to criticism a junior last week who checked in his code in the root directory including 3 wsdls, 2 of which were the same file, and a set of 3rd party dlls which he committed in a sub directory and the root directory. The code wasn't formatted to any standard you could think up either, and there were several functions that were present but never called.
Obviously he got it working but it was not tidy, and that meant installation, and maintenance, would have been troublesome.
I think the biggest differences are in the coding technique. Everyone has a slightly different approach, but inexperienced developers tend to produce code that:
Because you asked the worst things, then my answer is as follows:
My biggest one is remembering to plan for flexibility. In classes, the requirements are almost always set forth at the beginning and never change. In software, it's often the opposite: you get a vague set of requirements, and they change often (even daily). The best thing that you can do to help with this is to code flexibly: loose coupling, small functions that can be used reliably in multiple situations, and avoiding hard-coding things as much as possible.
In time, you're likely to learn a) what things are most likely to change, and conversely what likely won't, and b) how to anticipate change requests and plan for them.
