Welp, I've been doing software work in the 'real world' for exactly a year now, so I figured I'd share some of my thoughts for those who are interested.



I was always, always told that "you will learn 100x more on the job in the first 6 months than your entire time in college"


This was true...to an extent.

I learned a lot about automation (of the build process, testing suites, etc).

I learned how to efficiently debug problems (figuring out critical entry points, top level catch blocks, dataset visualizers in VS, etc).

I learned all kinds of stuff about proper business etiquette.

I learned about the bastardization of AGILE methodologies that some companies enforce.

I learned about legacy code, and maintaining it.

I learned about fading technology stacks, and the kinds of problems companies face when dealing with them. (IE - silverlight)

I learned much more about version control than I did in college, especially supporting multiple branches of live production code.

And probably so much more....about myself, about the company, and about things that help make you a more efficient developer.




Yet, I still feel like the foundation knowledge I got from my college degree prevails.

A lot of the stuff I have learned this year has been tightly coupled to the company (look, buzz words!). Specific architecture, specific business rules, etc.

I have definitely learned a lot of good, solid engineering ideas, but mostly from co-workers or self research. And it hasn't amounted to some crazy amount that blows all my previous 2 years of CS education out of the water.



This has been a year of ups and downs for me, as I had some optimistic conceptions of what my job might entail.

Yet, I spent a good portion of the year trying my best to get along with co-workers, fit in with company culture, and just solve tasks that were otherwise not really challenging in the abstract manner that a CS person might desire.



A lot of this might sound familiar, generic, every-day software company issues. But I don't know that - this is my first company.


In 2016, I am hoping to challenge myself more. I have signed myself up for a 48 hour game jam at the end of this month. I have declared my intent to my dev manager that I want to eventually become a team lead, and that I want to work on more challenging projects.

I am also working on making me, myself, a better person, both in health and personality.





Anyways, just kind of wanted to share my thoughts on the year with you all. I haven't posted here much lately but I still browse it every day.

I hope you all have a wonderful new year, and I hope this sub, even with its little activity, continues to help new folk, much like myself when I first joined.

it's past midnight. why aren't you drunk yet?

I am sobering up from earlier, and that is partly the reason I made this thread


alcohol + lack of sleep

Cheers & Happy New Year!

thanks! it was surprisingly a'ight

if you have any notes you can share about efficient debugging i would love you. i hear back from a prospective job tomorrow and a lot of what i would be doing is maintaining legacy code and debugging other software

are you comfortable with logging? IMO that's the first step to debugging.

A lot of the techniques you will learn to better debug a large, legacy code base will just come with time and knowledge of the architecture (if you can call it that)


For general tips, I would suggest, as Carte has mentioned, logging.

I personally don't do my own logging much, beyond catching SQL queries to and from our DB.

I spend a lot of time inside break mode in the application, and use Visual Studios introspection tools to view live data about in-memory objects and the call stack.


You should also learn what environment variables matter and when. For example, if you have a customer using your app in china and they are complaining that the emails they import into your system have extra line breaks inserted, you have to consider encoding as a possibility, and whether or not it is being handled correct on the client, during serialization/deserialization, on the server, or on the database level.

It could also be an OS thing too.