Understand the fundamentals

Understand the fundamentals

Learning a programming language is not the same as learning how to program. The ability to identify problems and visualize elegant solutions is at the heart of what it means to be a great developer.

An algorithm is essentially a logic problem and no matter how complex the solution, a developer should be able to diagram it on a whiteboard and explain it in plain English to the intern. There’ll be plenty of time to master frameworks, languages and other tools, but any problem should first be able to be solved in the abstract.

Honing the fundamentals also makes it easier to identify commonalities. For example, recognizing that JavaScript and PHP are both object-oriented languages that utilize first-class functions makes it easier to learn one after having learned the other.