How to become an excellent rather than a good software developer?

The season of job fairs has come to an end. We had some inspiring talks with students and potential job starters from all over the country.

We were seriously impressed by the attendance of 1st and 2nd year students. It’s never too early to reach out pro-actively to potentially hiring companies. This gave us a choice of concentrating on our target group: soon-to-be graduates or engaging a conversation with the younger students. We went for the latter! Amongst the inspiring discussions we had, one topic really stood out:

How to become an excellent rather than a good software developer?💡

But what does a recruiter know about this? Should we just shut up, skip the question, end the conversation and go to the cafeteria? No, let's think about it!

At Nexios, we look for profiles with a strong potential for becoming excellent in their job. Instead of waiting for those rare finds to come to us, why not empower students to become exceptional software developers? We firmly believe that with the right guidance, anyone can reach that level of excellence.

Not our business? As it is our mission to inspire young potentials, so why not starting right now?

Here is the journey we propose:

As a student, you’re learning to write good & functional code. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we would like to challenge you to strive for excellence.

How? 🤔

• Don't be too quickly satisfied with code that just works. Instead, challenge yourself to rethink it, refactor it, rewrite it and make it shorter, explicit, clear, beautiful. So clear that you need no comments.
• Show your code to more experienced students to continually improve your code. Go for the extra mile and push yourself to a level where there’s truly no room for improvement.
• Compare code with your peers, mates and challenge improvements. If you don’t understand the code from an older student, suggest that they rewrite it. It's a learning opportunity for both of you.
• When it comes to comments, treat them as a necessary evil. Avoid them as much as you can.

Why do we think that this is important? 👀

• Now you have the luxury to spend half a day on a line of code. Once you're in a job, that's over.
• If you hammer from the start on good routines of excellent code, you'll have them in your fingertips for the rest of your career and avoid bad habits.
• If you approach it as a group challenge, you benefit from the advantages of group learning.

This is a constant learning process. We invite you to let it sink and to let us know what you think about it.