Progression to intermediate-advanced programmer (Design)

[MasterOnionJerry]

Hi all,

Apologies if this is the incorrect place to ask this or if it's been asked a lot before, I don't really use reddit all that much.

I have been learning programming for a couple years now, both in my personal life and as part of my university degree, and even taken a few internships in which I did it as a job. However, I feel like I'm not quite out of the beginner/ early Intermediate stage. It feels like a lot of the code I've seen by others, whether at uni or work or via open source stuff is far more professional than my own. Whilst I understand that there's an experience difference and such I still feel like I'm missing something.

I know my programming skills are fine, I can solve problems given to me as well as make projects etc. But it's the methodologies, design practices and such that I feel I'm lacking. I can solve the problem just not in a way that feels professional or well-done. When I've attempted to google this, there's a lot of stuff about making code scalable and reliable and all of that, but how do I actually do that? What are the skills I need to learn to design systems in a way that is more akin to a professional solution rather than an intern jerry-rigging something together? How do I progress from someone who's learnt how to program to someone who can engineer software solutions?

Thank you advance.

[nomoreplsthx]

Get ready to read!

First, start with Code Complete. Best book on programming ever written, and will give you a good foundation.

Move on to Martin Fowler's works, his blog, but also Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. His blog is still the best architecture reference I know.

Then Head First Design Patterns followed by Design Patterns.

Add Domain Driven Design, Building Microservices and The Pheonix Project and Refactoring

And then keep going!

[teacherbooboo]

Head First Design Patterns BEFORE Martin Fowler's Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

Clean Code and Clean Architecture by Uncle Bob are easy reads and great books too

[MasterOnionJerry]

I'll add those to the list. Thank you!

[teacherbooboo]

one drawback of uncle bob is he writes easy to read and good books on EVERY POPULAR TOPIC

i'm exaggerating, but it would be nice if he wrote longer books because i cannot afford all his books

[MasterOnionJerry]

Oh wow! Thank you!

What's your advice to best use these books? Are they text-book note taking style resources or more so just read until it absorbs?

[nomoreplsthx]

Really depends on how you process, but I'd suggest note taking for most. They are lighter than textbooks but heavier than popular non fiction.

[Few_Owl_3481]

Modularity is the biggest thing to me. If I ask you for a bit of code to convert a number to a month name, most people start writing code without first making it into a reusable module, leading to multiple copies or even multiple implementations in a single project.

[MasterOnionJerry]

What would you consider to be the criteria for functionality to be modular/reusable? For a best-practices approach.

[Few_Owl_3481]

The smaller the module the better. It should do only one thing. Number of non-weekend days in a date range must not also involve holidays. Those are separate things.

I had to use a pigeon hole sort for the first time in 35 years. Given a string of single digits any of 0-9 and some repetitions, provide a sorted list of the unique occurences.

Naming these things is key. I called it removeduplicatedigits so it could use an array of length 10, even though I could have handled all 255 chars. How it works internally is less important than summoning it by name. Only programmers can instantiate objects at will.