If you could give yourself programming advice in the past, what would it be?

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One piece of advice

I was talking with some friends (about C++ programming), and someone ended up saying "I wish I could have known about the STL when I started C++." We got into an interesting conversation on advice we would have given to ourselves had we been able.

I thought I would present the question here, as a community wiki. So the question is,

If you could go back in time and give yourself programming advice, what would you say?

You can give yourself advice about any programming topic, from learning a new language sooner to using one part of a specific language, but please make it something that you wish you yourself could have known sooner.

One piece of advice per post, please. I'll go ahead and post mine in a little while, as an answer to the question.

Answer 1

I wish I'd known just how required, and not just nice, source control is.

Answer 2

I would have told myself to learn version control. I went years without it, and only for a few months now have begun using it. I can't believe what I've been missing. My code is cleaner (since I don't just comment out code that doesn't work), I'm not afraid to refactor, and I worry less about losing my data.

Answer 3

Assume that what you have learnt so far is only the tip of the iceberg, and keep on studying.

Answer 4

learn how to write unit tests

Answer 5

Forget voxels. It's all about polygons.

Answer 6

Single Responsibility Principle - would have saved tons of time in software maintenance had I know more about that.

Answer 7

sorry if this isn't a "programming answer", I still would say this to the "past me". try your hardest to understand the business angle of the projects you are working on. how much budget does this project have - how much benefit is it going to bring the business?

Answer 8

Comments are future-you's friends.

Answer 9

Real simple. Stay hungry, stay foolish. And never stop learning.

And, I never did :) I guess I took my advice from the future.

Answer 10

"Before you write that piece of crap, imagine me coming back in time from ten years in the future, beating that tripe into /dev/null with a suite of unit tests, and telling you:

\"Before you write that piece of crap, imagine me ....

Answer 11

I grew up as a (BASIC, ANSI C, Pascal, VB3, Clipper) programmer...

20 years down the track my advise to myself would be:

Learn how to play football! You Putz!

Cheers. Keith.