Do your homework: More you practice the concepts learned in class, the faster you’ll pick them up
Don’t try to memorize anything: You’ll memorize things naturally through the act of doing things over and over again. Besides, if you don’t remember something just look it up (i.e. google).
Work smarter not harder: In additional to looking things up, developers are really good at referencing past code that they’ve used in the past to solve problems they encounter in the present. So keep your past code organized so you easily reference it later. You don’t get points for memorizing anything, but you do get points for being resourceful and using past work to help you move a litter faster today.
Ask Questions: Don’t be afraid to ask questions, everyone learns differently, it’s the instructor’s responsibility to ensure you grasp the concepts. Your questions helps me (your instructor) understand what’s working and what’s not.
Change your perspective of failure: Expects things to not work. That’s where the fun part and truly where the learning begins. It’s during the troubleshooting phase where’s you’ll gained a deep understanding of concepts taught in class. If everything worked the first time, you’d never learn anything :)
Get comfortable with the fact that there are multiple ways to do things: If I gave a 10 experienced developers a coding homework assignment chances are that I will receive 10 different approaches and they’ll all be “correct” (meaning each approach will accomplish the stated goals of the assignment). There is no 1 right answers when it comes to coding. There are “best practices” some of which we will push in this course, others best practices will be learned through continued practice. Instead of focusing on what you think may be the “best” approach, just focus on ensuring that your program / assignments is the goals or requirements (“just get it things working first”).
Perfection is the enemy of good enough: When you go through your homework assignments and labs your # 1 goal is to “just get things working” and not to make it perfect the first time. Get things working first (no matter how janky it may seem) and only after you’ve got it working should you go through the process developers call refactoring, optimizing the code without changing the behavior (i.e. making it look nice).
Use names that make sense: As a developer you are going to be frequently tasked with naming things. Naming things is hard, but my advice is to be as explicit as possible. You should always write your code as if someone else is going to read it and you want them to be able to quickly understand what’s going on. One of the best ways to accomplish that is to use names that highly contextual. For example, if you have a variable that is supposed to represent a person’s first name, then be as explicit as possible:
// very bad - you don't get points for making names super short
var n = "Kiara"
// ok but not great
var name = "Kiara"
// best - explicit, there's no doubt what this variable should represent
var firstName = "Kiara"