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Getting started the right way as a developer is tough, so I wrote you a letter I'd love to have received some ten years ago.
Getting a diploma does not mean the end of studying
Holding that shiny piece of paper you worked so hard for in your hands? Congrats!
In reality, you are just getting started. While your official studies are over, it does not mean that you do not need to learn new tricks anymore. Quite the contrary, actually: modern software evolves so fast that you need to learn new things every day to stay current. It's a good idea to come up with a daily routine of checking what's new in your field. For developers, Hackernews and Proggit are good for this. Ask what your colleagues read.
The real gems – and most satisfying lessons – lie in the comments section. When browsing Proggit, I recommend reading the comments before committing fifteen minutes to reading a nicely titled (or click-baited) article. Do this. Do this daily. Even on the weekends. You will thank yourself in a year.
Sound advice?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Monday December 05 2016, @12:48AM
Wait, what? You think Agile is BS? Lot of aspects of programming change awfully fast. How better to keep up than with an Agile mindset?
For example, how to write a graphical app has changed immensely since the 1980s. In the early 80s, you targeted a platform, perhaps CGA graphics on the PC, or the Apple II graphics, or maybe a Commodore 64. Might do ports to whichever ones you didn't work with first. By the late 80s, there was VGA graphics on the PC and a plethora of graphics cards and drivers for them. The DOS operating systems of the times weren't much, very simple and limited, hardly more than loaders. And today, all that knowledge is very obsolete and useless. We moved from direct manipulation of graphics hardware to libraries such as xlib, which is now also obsolete. Today it is GUI libraries such as Gnome and KDE. For game graphics it is OpenGL or DirectX, or not even those, would go higher level yet with something like OGRE or OpenSceneGraph. Meantime, the OS has expanded mightily and is no longer a mere loader of binaries that can be readily brushed aside once finished loading your code.