Things I wish I could tell my 18 year old self.

1) Accept you will make mistakes.
2) Truly learn the language you are using.
3) Write idiomatic code for the language you are using.
4) Be upfront about not knowing something.
5) Don't let not knowing something stop you from learning it.
6) None of us knew X until we learned it.
7) Understand your strengths and weaknesses as a developer, play to them.
8) Be willing to try new things.
9) X language isn't ALWAYS the best choice, X paradigm isn't ALWAYS the best choice. Choose wisely.
10) You won't know everything, but you might know more than others.
11) Your ideas and ego don't matter more than ensuring the product works.
12) "Perfection is the enemy of the good [enough]" - Voltaire
13) "Perfection is not achieved when there's nothing more to add, but when there's nothing more to remove." - Einstein.
14) Conflicts happen, deal with it.
15) Develop a toolset and really learn them.
16) Try new tools, they may prove better than what you were using.
17) Don't manage your own memory unless you absolutely have to, you are probably not smarter than the collective intelligence of the team that built the various garbage collection methods.
18) People can be dicks, especially online.
19) If you are new and people are being dicks to you, did you skip past the irc message about etiquette? If you did, you're the dick in this situation.
20) It can be tough, but it is fun, so have fun!

It's disheartening to see a senior member of my team shitting on the code of less mature developers. Don't just say "this is unacceptable", elaborate, teach them. How are they going to action anything from that feedback?

Take the time to respond to their questions when they ask for clarification on what you're saying. Don't berate them.

Honestly some developers need to learn a thing or two about code etiquette.

There's no room for good cop / bad cop behaviour.

the world has forced me to turn this upside down instead.

oops I mean my client

Had a five hour long debate with one of our Senior Developers today about pull request etiquette.

His view was reviewers should always email or call him before adding comments to any of his requests and they should never block them as he should be allowed to code in "his own style" and should be able to approve his own pull requests.

I explained that we have code standards and an agreed PR workflow be needs to comply with.

He then started talking about meteors and plane crashes. Literally no helping some people.

Let's try this.

In the project I'm working there is an strict rule : NO COMMENTS!!!

I mean wth, the times I've spend hours trying to understand the crappy legacy code in VB.Net that has been there almost decades, that wouldn't happen with comments, I know i know there are some supernatural developers that think in binary and their eyes work as compilers, but I'm not like that, so seriously go to hell.

P.S. Of course I follow that rule, after all, my code is so damn perfect that even a baby can understand it.

jk