Hi all,

I started Software Development 4-5 years ago as a working student. Working full-time for 3 years now. I used to work at a startup until I started at my current company, an enterprise based and I work on a complex project with 300-400 developers on the same project.

I'd like to share some "noob" mistakes I made so far and the counter measures taken to mitigate them. I hope this helps someone who is starting out or is like me.

1

I took down all the notes at work in a handwritten notebook. Now I have all troubleshooting tips in a big notebook. This was convenient at the start but now it's a big mess. I can't easily find out any important notes or sort out things. Hard to pass info to a fellow colleague.

action (in progress): move all notes online. I am moving all notes to Evernote (MS Onenote is also an alternative). This makes it easy to organize/find and share notes.

2

Unorganized browser bookmarks. It was chaos and it kept on growing and I added many duplicates under different folders. Some of these were never revisited. I also missed browser bookmarks for read later content.

action: organized bookmarks under 2-5 folders. Synced bookmarks on different devices. I started to use Evernote for read-later web content.

3

No To-Do list for the day. We use JIRA at work. This helps to organize software development tasks but there were other non-development everyday tasks and I managed them poorly without a To Do app.

action: I started to use Microsoft Planner. Trello is a good alternative. Now, I know the task priorities for each day.

4

No Private Wiki on Knowledge gained. As the project, I work on is quite complex, there are so many details to know and not everyone knows everything. I hardly documented anything for myself and the public wiki is not great.

action: I am planning to use Evernote to make an internal private wiki.

If you have any tips to share, please feel free to write them and help each other. Thanks!