Ask HN: What is your best advice for a junior software developer?
Read at least HackerNews and possibly some other tech news site regularly. And then make sure to not get too caught up in the hype for new stuff.<p>As someone working in technology, you are going to be learning new stuff continually (or your usefulness is going to diminish over time). By keeping up to date with tech news, you get a lot of context for what people are using, what&#x27;s coming down the pipe etc. You may end up experimenting with stuff and then you&#x27;ll be ahead of all your colleagues. It broadens your knowledge, and if you have to deal with clients it means you will usually know what they&#x27;re talking about.<p>There&#x27;s a few pitfalls to watch out for though. HN is great, but it is still an echochamber that can be focused on web and related tech. I was mostly an embedded software engineer for years and found comments like &#x27;does anyone even use C anymore&#x27; hilarious (yes, see Linux kernel, device drivers, and your washing machine for details). It can also be very easy to end up wanting to push for the &#x27;shiny new thing&#x27; too early. I tinkered with Rust from very early on, but it&#x27;s only in the last 6 months or so that I&#x27;d suggest it is ready for use in most companies (depending on application area). Javascript frameworks suffer this problem particularly badly. Mature beats shiny 9 times out of 10 - running into a problem that 100 people have met before and posted about on StackOverflow and your tool caters for, is much better than being the first person to encounter said problem.