By Mustafa Türk - Front-end developer - almost 5 years ago
I did an internship at Skryv as part of my studies Multec at Erasmus University College Brussels. In short, my assignment was a mix of front-end dev and designing wireframes for the Skryv Studio. Working in a scale-up was a challenging and get-out-of-your-comfort-zone experience. These are my 3 takeaways of the past three months, enjoy!
I remember being afraid during my first weeks to ask a question which would make me look “stupid”. Well, you will probably look more stupid once you spend a few days on that problem. Asking questions can save you at least half of the time.
Planning your question is key. Give enough context to the listener, so the listener can understand the current situation with minimum effort. This will make the situation and problem easy to understand and will save you and the other person’s time.
You need to understand the project and see the bigger picture before you dive into coding. Misunderstanding the requirements can lead to a huge waste of time and energy. You can avoid this by putting a little bit more effort into communicating with your mentor or project manager to clarify some requirements.
A big project can be scary sometimes. I remember me stressing about how big the project was during my first weeks.
The key here is to break the project into smaller pieces that can easily be done and managed. Using a visual project organizing tool such as Trello can definitely help you with that.
I learned that the key for a clean, understandable and maintainable code is to ensure classes and function have a single purpose, and the purpose can be understood at first glance.
Reading your own code 2 weeks later is no different from reading other people’s code. If you don’t understand the code that you’ve written 2 weeks ago, you can’t really expect that other people who will read that code 5 years later will understand it. Just as you would not like to spend hours to read and understand the complicated code, your teammates wouldn’t appreciate it either.