3 things I learned in my first 2 months as a Software Engineer

Prelude: in 2017 I was still working as a Digital Marketeer, but found my passion lies in creating and managing software. Nearly four years later, I finally landed my dream job as a (front-end) Software Engineer.

Let me share 3 insights from those first 2 months:

Javascript: null - null === 0

Why is this statement true? Because values are implicitly coerced to numbers when you perform mathematical operations on them. And null coerced to a number equals 0.

This actuallly caused a nice little bug in production. I didn't think through on a - b when both can be null and figured the result would be null as well.

After fixing it, I called my best friend in these situations: Unit Test. Make sure you keep him close.

RxJS is relatively easy to grasp

Do you also find observables and subjects a tad confusing? Marble diagrams didn't help me all that much at first. Who still plays with marbles anyway?

But when you're creating observables on a daily basis, you start to see things differently. It's like Neo in The Matrix. Free yourself from the restrictions of synchronous programming and everything starts to make sense.

After a while, you'll immediately spot how to turn synchronous code into asynchronous engineering masterpieces. Don't see it yet? You will when you get there, trust me.

Contracts are underrated

Granted, contracts don't guarantee you'll get it right the first time. Time and effort should be devoted to writing specifications and creating dummy data for endpoints.

But contracts have real benefits thanks to one fundamental truth: requirements are interpreted differently, based on the interpreter. By defining a contract, there is an agreement on how (part of) the requirements should be interpreted. This agreement is not up for debate: it is detailed, accurate and leaves (nearly) no room for interpretation.