While coding can be fun, it can also take your sweat away. Sleepless nights, busy mornings and hectic evenings is a story of every second developer, especially those who have just started their career as a programmer.
When learning to program, you are the king of writing bad code, resulting in errors and bugs. It is not a story of any particular coder, but every coder goes through the same phase. In fact, some of the errors are recurring by newbie coders.
If you want to pursue your career as a coder, have a look at some of the mistakes that you need to avoid.
1. Fear of Writing the Wrong Code
While it’s not just about the coders; people from various walks of life are afraid of doing things for the first time. If you are a beginner and think of yourself as not capable or good enough, you just need to change your approach.
No matter, on what programming language you are working on, unless you have fear in mind, you can’t move forward. Overcome your fear before it overcomes you. Sit back, relax and give some time to calm your nerves. Even an experienced coder commit mistakes that are quite silly.
2. Muddled Code Formatting
Normally, new coders don’t pay attention to the formatting of the code such as not indenting the code or using inconsistent lines and white space. As a newbie coder, you should indent your code properly to show its logical structure. Giving space right from the edge of the window, you can show where functions, loops, and conditionals start and end.
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Formatting your code can be done in several ways. As long as you are consistent, it does not matter what type of formatting you have adopted. On the contrary, leaving codes that are not needed anymore is very bad. Make sure to eliminate sets of code, which are not needed any longer.
3. Inconsistent Use of Upper and Lower Case
Most of the languages are case sensitive while few of them does not require you to take care of it. However, consistency really matters and need to take care of when writing variables and function names.
Moreover, some coders need to shift from one language to another. They try to apply the same rules in different languages that they have learned. For example, JavaScript, variables, and functions should use camel case where the first letter is written in the small case while additional ones are written in upper case. Some languages might use underscores to separate the words. But, what if you use the same format in JavaScript that uses CamelCase.
4. Not Utilizing the Power of Debugging Tools
Working on languages like ActionScript3, Java or C#, make sure to use debugging tools. These languages can help you know errors in detail, which can be tracked down easily with a debugger. If you are using JavaScript, you don’t have much power of debugging. However, “alert() will help you much in debugging the code and identifying errors.
5. Not Backing Your Work
Imagine yourself in a situation when you have to deliver the work in the morning and end up with an excuse that you lost hours work. There are tools that will help you out backing up your coding data, even if there is a minor disaster, burglary or a major computer malfunction. While working on open source projects, make sure to check the code with GitHub or SVN repository.
