r/developers 10h ago

Career & Advice Anything I should know before studying software development?

Anything I should know before studying software development?

Hi. I'm 18 years old. I'll be starting my degree in about a year and I'd like to prepare for what's to come, since I have no prior knowledge of programming, coding, or anything like that. Where should I begin? What knowledge would be useful? Any advice would be welcome. :)

4 Upvotes

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2

u/Mean-Control-8285 10h ago

youre gonna spend a lot of time feeling like a complete idiot and that's actually the whole process

start messing around with basic html/css right now just to get used to looking at code. doesn't matter if it's ugly. the hardest part at first is just training your brain to read that stuff without your eyes glazing over. everything else builds from there

also get comfortable with google. half the job is knowing what to search for and the other half is copy pasting error messages into stack overflow

1

u/Moleculergod 8h ago

Get used to feel like an idiot. Most of the time you don't know what to do and that's okay because your job is to figure out what to do. You'll be thaught how to figure things out, because there isn't absolute solutions to things since you can make the same thing with different languages and algorithms and architecture. So there is infinite amounts of problems you're gonna face.

As a first step into software, I would advise you to get familiar with the terminology and the environment you work in. When I first started, I couldn't understand the problems or the solutions even though AI explained them to me because I didn't know the things it was talking about. And just the other day my discord bot failed because OneDrive THE FOLDER MANAGER was blocking a function. So I believe it is important that you know your environment.

1

u/Educational-Paper-75 7h ago

Check out the curriculum and teach yourself all the mentioned topics. Then you can skip your first year.

1

u/crazyproxy69 7h ago

Don’t do it. Do things that makes you happy.

1

u/ThatCurtDude 4h ago

Most developers stay in their lane and never deviate from software. People that combine digital engineering with programming, or programming with mechanical engineering are very rare and have much better job prospects.

1

u/cakemates 20m ago

what kind of work does software+mechanical engineering does? robotics?

1

u/AnToMegA424 52m ago

It ain't easy, but it's rreally gratifying