"The only good thing to do with good advice is pass it on; it is never of any use to oneself." ― Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

As a new developer trying to launch a career, you've got a challenging but rewarding path ahead of you.

You need to make sure you remain knowledgeable across a large number of technologies and disciplines, in addition to networking your way into a few job opportunities. You've also got to decide what type of company you’d like to work for - startup or established, or even if you'd like to strike it out on your own.

Regardless of your choices, everyone needs a few words of great advice to help them on their way.

So, I chatted to our seriously talented team of highly experienced SOLID developers to find out what advice they would give to a newbie developer. This is what they said.

[As a senior developer, if there's any other great advice you've received over the years, we welcome it in the comments below.]

"Always make sure you fully understand a project's requirements before beginning the development. That way you end up with the right finished product."
~ Tim Craib (7 years experience)


"Prototyping is a powerful tool - don't get stuck trying to design a solution for too long, often the solution becomes clearer when you start building it."
~ Oliver Gardner (12 years experience)


"Working with great peers will help you up your game, find a team that is passionate and really good at what they do. There is so much to learn and it goes exponentially faster when you have an experienced team to support you that is also fun to work with."
~ Manuel De Jesus (16 years experience)


"Unit testing. Few things give you as much of a warm and fuzzy feeling as when you run your bit of code through the wringer and it stands up to the test. It takes time and discipline to get into the habit and to do it well, but its worth the investment." 
~ Christopher Hamman (11 years experience)

"Don't be afraid to ask questions. Some concepts and conventions will be foreign to you and that's OK. In domain-driven design, sometimes the concepts will be domain specific and you need to gain understanding of the domain before the software concepts may make sense."
~ Louis Fourie (3 years experience)


"You will never know everything in software programming but you will always be learning. Practice makes perfect! Always stay on top of the latest developments in this often changing environment"
~ Kimesh Daje (3 months experience)


"Concepts are more important than syntax, paradigm shifts don't happen at a syntax level. You may not be working at Google or Facebook, but that doesn't mean you can't learn from their engineering approaches and try them out. OWASP hacking techniques, automated regression testing, continuous deployment and trunk based development can all be used with COBOL."
~ Manuel De Jesus (16 years experience)


"Become familiar with UML (unified modelling language). Diagrams help you understand problems and design solutions, and are a great way to convey information to your customer."
~ Oliver Gardner (12 years experience)


"You will learn the most through doing, so build things and learn new technologies."
~ David Weber (5 years experience)


"My go-to resources for technical queries are Google and StackOverflow"
~ Louis Fourie (3 years experience)


"Consistency is often better than the most elegant design."
~ Oliver Gardner (12 years experience)


I hope you found some inspiration in what our team has to say.