Krishnan's Personal Website

This is an excellent video that I stumbled upon on Youtube that will be helpful for self taught developers to improve and grow to the next level. 

If you feel the video is long and you have no time to watch then you can go through the main bullet points that I have mentioned below. 

5 Signs of an Inexperienced Self-Taught Developer

1. Making it work is not enough. 

Your code needs to be well written, well documented and readable by others. Make sure that you plan the features first before firing the text editor and banging on the keyboard. 

2. Huge code base changes

Do not make huge pull requests in one go. Keep your pull requests one feature or bug so that seniors can give meaningful comments for improvement. 

Also small meaningful pull requests will not block the other changes from getting deployed just because one change is not up to the mark. 

3. Do not getting into the vicious circle of learning new frameworks

Though it is important to be a lifelong learner if you want to succeed as a programmer, it is also equally important to be really strong in one framework or programming language. 

If you really want to learn new programming languages It is better to learn low level languages like C, Rust, C++, Go etc. 

4. Do not work on too many different things

Focus on the task in hand and finish to the best of your ability and then move on to the next task.Do not spread yourself thin by doing too many things at the same time. You will not become an expert that way. 

5. Do not avoid criticism of your code

Unless you show your code to others you will never know what your mistakes and weaknesses are. Always open to allow other people to read your code and accept any valid criticism as a means to improve in your programming abilities. 

Video that taught me this