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I have now been paid to write code for over two years. In that time, my views about programming have changed a lot.

For me, the most important lessons weren’t about learning the intricacies of a particular language or framework. Instead, my biggest mental shifts have been more about understanding programming in general, working with other people, and making something that can be maintained long after you stop working on it.

The examples in this article are all written in JavaScript, but I hope they’re simple enough that they’d be easy to understand no matter your background. Also, these ideas are subjective. If you disagree, I’d love to hear more in the comments.

1.You’re writing code for people, not computers

When I started out, it seemed like coding was all about writing instructions for computers to interpret.Good code felt like code that got the job done.Good code is, therefore, code written for other people. We have more in common with traditional writers than we might think!

2. People disagree about what makes code readable

While a lot of style issues can be solved with your favourite code formatter, it’s important to know that code readability practices change depending on context. In general, we should aspire to write code that is readable by the other people that are working on it, based on their experience and preferences.

3.Programming is all about data

To beginner programmers, the idea of making software can feel very mysterious. It’s easy to imagine the final outcome but much harder to understand how to get there. One of my earliest aha! moments was that programming is all about data: fetching it, modifying it, displaying it, and sending it somewhere else.

4.Performance doesn’t matter (except when it does)

In an ideal world, we’d have time to make sure all our code ran as quickly as possible. Often however, time spent finetuning performance could be better spent doing something else: In business, fixing bugs or creating new features will generally be more valuable than shaving a few hundred milliseconds off a particular function or code block.

5.A lot of UI is smoke and mirrors

Finally, a note on the visual side of programming. Something I didn’t fully appreciate as a beginner was that good UI is often about trickery — making things seem faster or more interesting than they normally would.

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