6 invaluable things I would tell myself when I was new to coding

1. Don't be a perfectionist
I've always considered myself a bit of a perfectionist and thought it's cool. No matter what, I've tried to do something in the best possible way, cover all possible and impossible use cases. Sometimes it led to horrible procrastination. In one case, it was a fear that I couldn't do it perfectly that made me put off the task. But most of the time, I was polishing everything up again and again just until the deadline instead of iterating several times and fixing not-so-obvious bugs before the deadline. I'm still trying to find a "perfect" balance.

2.Don't be afraid to go deeper into tools you are using
Just don't use everything as a black box. For example, if you use Flutter for building mobile apps, you won't be able to create a robust app without knowing some framework's internals. You can easily block the UI thread by doing complex calculations, so the user will think that the app is broken. If you knew that you should have used another isolate (because all your code by default runs in UI thread) for this kind of task, you'd be better off.

3. Learn how to debug, please
Yes, yes. Debugging is not inserting print statements in any situation. It's logging. Learn how to use breakpoints, so you can inspect the entire program state, not just the values you thought to print out in advance. This can massively speed up the bug-fixing process.

4. Bugs are inevitable
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in" - Edsger Dijkstra. We are human beings. We make mistakes. Sure, there are all sorts of techniques to decrease the number of defects in software, but none of them can prove the absence of bugs.

5. Write code every day
Every day is just another opportunity to learn something new. Consistent practice makes perfect. This guy has managed to do it, so you also can.

6. Use code generation whenever possible
I'll never write another toJson/fromJson method. There is just no reason to write more code when you can write a short description of what you need, and a generator will be willing to make it happen.

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