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I'm a junior developer at a company that has asked me to establish academic goals for the near future. I didn't realize how hard of a question this was until I could only come up with one answer, off the top of my head:
Learn more Design Patterns
What subjects have you learned, after you finished school, that have helped you significantly?
The items that have helped me most significantly (along with references to texts) are:
If you don't know them already:
I agree with most of everything listed above, but wanted to include something I wish more developers regardless of their level knew. Know your tools.
Watching some of my developers is painful as they take the most difficult way to get things done. Learn the ins and outs of your various IDEs or command line utils. While learning all of the stuff already mentioned will make you a better developer, learning the tools will make you more productive.
The biggest ones for me was a thorough review of the following topics:
For me, it was more practical than academic: XML/XSL, which was never really covered in as much depth as was necessary in school.
Also good to know if you don't already know is databases and SQL. If you do have experience in this area - go deeper (you can always go deeper) into topics like data warehousing and analytics. General (not specific to any particular system) data modelling is also a good skill. Of course, these are hard to work on if there's no basis for these skills in your workplace (but it's usually possible to find something, even if a bit contrived).
Communication skills is an area that needs work almost always.
You need to understand how to effectively design normalized databases and how to write efficient queries. Daabase do not refactor as easily as other code and you need to be in the habit of getting it close to right from the beginning. No one should be allowed to touch a databse without a thorough understnding of joins and how to do things in sets rather than row-by-row. No one should be writing code for a database that is large and under much performance stress without knowing how to write high performance queries and what things to avoid doing (Cursors, correlated sub-queries, etc.) I could easily come up with several hundred training topics on databases alone.
How to effectively do a code review is another skill many people don't have.
Testing - unit testing, writing tests first, etc. How to translate requirements into tests.
I've alawys found it helpful to develop training topics on mistakes that I, as a senior person, see happening frequently when I code review, especially when more than one person makes them. So ask your seniors what mistakes they frequently see juniors making. Those are critical training topics.
This is a terrific opportunity. Your employer wants you to grow so they can promote you.
Get an course catalog from the best school in your area. Surely you will find something that is both interesting and related to your work. If you don't, then change professions.
Company specific technologies / internal platforms etc. I am surprised nobody mentioned this - It is very hard to pick them up/master them around a deadline, so planning helps.
And yeah - if you have not used a source control system, git.
Learn how to be most resourceful any place, any time.
For example, a software engineer would know to pick the best design pattern for the task at hand.
If you are using Unix or Linux, learn and master vi, sed, awk, regex, perl/python, shell scripting, etc, enough to be able to automate as much of the repetitive tasks as possible. If you use an IDE, learn all there is about it. This will be boring and off-putting to begin with. But you'd see how powerful these tools are when those who have mastered them use them to delegate most of their mundane tasks to the computer.
Touch typing/typing closer to the speed of thought can be very useful. If possible, learn Colemak or Dvorak after some investigation into both, to suit your needs. Both are known to cause less strain on the hands and cause tremendous speed gains.
Design patterns, as you suggest, is an excellent topic to learn. While design patterns are heavily used in object oriented programming, the principles laid out in Code Complete are said to be useful to their readers in who work in other programming paradigms as well.
Also, The Architecture of Open Source Applications is an excellent book and freely available on the web. This book aims to show you the architectures of reputed open source software and critique the architectures. Much like what an architecture student would go through at university, says the book.
