Gain insights into launching your software career, managing development processes, and understanding the big picture to confidently advance in the industry faster than your peers.

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This course focuses on how to kickstart your career in the software industry and how to manage various operational and development processes. This is an excellent overview of the “big picture” and the many facets of software development that a lot of new developers lack. A great primer for starting an exciting career in software development.

By the end of this course, you will be able to confidently go into the workforce and make strides in your career quicker than your fellow peers.

New Programmer's Survival Manual

In toy programs, it’s easy to tell the difference between correct and incorrect. Does `factorial(n)` return the correct number? That’s easy to check; one number goes in, and another number comes out. But, there are potentially many inputs in extensive programs, such as state or function parameters, and many outputs or other side effects. That’s not so easy to check.

# Isolation and side effects
Textbooks and some courses prefer to use mathematics problems for programming examples, partly because computers are good at mathematics, but mostly because it’s easy to reason about numbers in isolation. We can call `factorial(5)` all day long, and it’ll return the same thing. Network connections, files on disk, and especially users all have a nasty habit of being less predictable.

When a function changes something outside its local variables, for example when it writes data to a file or a network socket, it’s said to have **side effects**. The opposite, a **pure function**, always returns the same thing when given the same arguments and does not change any outside state. Obviously, pure functions are a lot easier to test than functions with side effects.

Most programs have a mix of pure and impure code. However, not many programmers think about which parts are which. We might see something like the following program:


Learn the difference between pure functions and functions with side effects, along with the testing strategy of both functions.

Getting Started

Program for Production

Getting Our Tools in Order

Be Your Own Manager

Team Work

Inside the Company

Mind Your Business

Kaizen

Conclusion

Insist on Correctness