What are the essentials that a new and inexperienced developer should learn, assimilate and make a habit for his future career?

[cgbosse]

Formal education such as university teaches mostly theory though it does often not give access to mentored learning nor does it necessarily create the necessary understanding of essential skills. We should look into researching and defining what is perceived by others and ourselves to be essential for new inexperienced developers. What do they need to know and learn or even make a habit of so that they can speed up their progress, create better code and collaborate efficiently in developer team settings?

Our colleague @WarmBeer gave us his point of view of the things that he would have liked to know when he was 12 and creating his first apps and wasting immense time and creating cluttered code.

The things that he wished to have known are:

• How to create clean code.
• How to effectively make and utilize user stories to structure and split up his projects and development.
• How to open issues properly, think through them and communicate them to others.
• Appreciate the importance of test.
• How to use GitHub.

[cgbosse]

In terms of coding languages I assume that they should have some basic knowledge of:

• python
• javascript or typescript
• html
• css

[cgbosse]

Things that I wonder is what you think if they should learn about TDD?