Know the basics of your tools of trade

Last Update: 26.09.2018. By Jens in Newsletter

Whatever your tools are, know them and know the basics.

If you code in Java for 10 years and you have a hard time writing a simple basic app there is something wrong. I know, it is hard to forget those when you are stuck in things like JEE or custom made frameworks. But honestly, it is your tool of trade, so you still need to remember the basics. Although the basics may change over time like iterating over lists in Java. Yeah, it is your job to stay up to date.

I recently met one of that species. Stuck in a custom-made enterprise framework. Yet, he still wrote Java but it was so abstract and custom tied to their own framework, that he could barely write a simple command line tool for reading a CSV, doing so tiny calculations and export it again as a CSV file in a training situation. Also, everything of his code looked so pre Java 5. Somehow stuck in time. Yet, the basics moved on. I know that it is hard. When you are tied up in such an environment and just do your job there, you will eventually stop looking at the progress outside. Yeah, Java might progress but it does not concern you.

However, this will hit you quadruple hard when you must leave your custom framework environment. No one cares about your experience there and no one still thinks you can code in Java when you missed almost a decade of Java changes. Think about it.