Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by duiker101 | Hacker News Reader

You will screw up at some point. It's ok. It happens, we all took a website offline or merged the wrong branch. It's part of the learning process.

Learn from everyone, there are many different ways of doing everything, don't just follow blindly one person, observe what everyone is doing and choose whatever works for you.

Be always open to improving, learning and becoming a better dev. This is a job that is ever evolving.

Read the error and understand it. Don't click blindly "ok" or "close" on error messages, they might contain essential clues that are too easily dismissed. Error messages are often done poorly but are also one of the main tools we have.

Don't overdo it. It's soooo easy to burn out, be conscious of your health.

Have a great first day!

I remember my first big screw up, at my first start-up I worked at.

I mounted production server webdir as an sftp mount remotely. Then I remember doing chown -R at some higher level directory locally thinking it surely won't affect NTFS remote system, but boy was I wrong. It caused a one whole day of downtime. Thankfully easy to fix once I figured it out.

My boss couldn't live it down for a week or two, but eventually it dissipated and I earned a lifetime lesson, and nothing really was lost.

Almost 7 years in since my first job as a developer and I did a 7k£ worth of damage at my current company after merging an enormous PR which among others, messed with the production DB. It was so huge none approved it but I got written confirmation from my manager to merge and "see what happens in production". :P Shit happens. It's never your fault, well, unless when it actually is.

Thank you for your sound advice and wishes. Some of your "don't"s seem like traps I fall into easily. I'll be extra conscious of them now.

They are traps that everyone can fall in very easily and are way more common that it seems. But because they are "bad" they are often not talked about or highlighted.

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