7 things I wished I knew early in my developer career.
After more than a decade of coding (and breaking) stuff in C#, JavaScript, Dynamics 365, and Power Platform, here’s what I really wish someone had told me earlier:
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You don’t need to know everything. I used to think real devs had the entire .NET SDK memorized. Now I just ask Google, ehh… I mean ChatGPT, “C# datetime add one day” for the 500th time. You need to know how and where to find the answer.
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Learn by doing it. You can’t learn Power Automate by binge-watching YouTube. You learn it by breaking your flow, fixing it, then breaking it again, slightly better this time.
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Perfection is a lie. I once spent hours naming a plugin class “ContactSyncHelperServiceManagerV2”? Yeah… that didn’t make it faster. Ugly code that works beats elegant code that never ships. btw… I still struggle with this one.
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You’ll never feel ready. Not for your first plugin. Not for deploying to production. Not for becoming a freelancer. Do it anyway, you’ll learn on the fly.
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Problem-solving and analytic thinking Knowing how to program is important, but it is only a way to write down your solutions. Your solutions are the value that you bring.
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Nobody cares about your clever architecture or perfect CI/CD pipeline. The business just wants the button to create the record and send the email. And yes, they’ll still ask to change the button color.
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Burnout is real. Take breaks. Sleep. Go outside. Have family time. You’re a developer, not a background service running 24/7 in a consumption plan.
What is your most important lesson?
