As web developers, front and back end, what 3 things do you know now that you wished you knew starting out?

Version Control:

(I wrote an answer in another question, I’m just gonna copy it over because it's that important!)

When I first got into Web Dev the companies I worked in didn’t use any form of Version Control. All we used was — brace yourself — Filezilla.

Yup.

I’ve built an ecommerce site and maintained it for a whole year using FTP only. In a team of 6. You can imagine the circus that was. Only 1 person could work on 1 file at a time. God help those who wanted to edit style.css, it was always in use by someone. And if someone chose ‘Reopen Local File’, all work by the others were lost.

*Shudders*

Enter Git. It feels like a breeze. I even version control my tasklist, almost every project will have a ‘tasks’ file that goes up and down with every commit.

Branches? That felt like magic.

Prioritizing tasks:

Web Development is a never ending process. The more people that review your work, the more feedback there will be.

As a newbie I used to try and accommodate all the changes requested.

Untill I learnt a magical word — “No” !

I learnt to break down tasks into: Must-Haves and Nice-to-Haves, and then prioritize my work accordingly. It becomes difficult to explain a client sometimes why we cannot do everything that they require, since its ‘so damn important’ that they ‘cannot go live without’, but once you’re able to make a decent distinction between the Must-Haves and Nice-To-Haves, your work gets a lot more manageable.

Take a Break sometimes:

Sometimes you’re just rushing to fix an issue. You spend hours staring at it, trying everything possible to fix it. You debug it in and out, eventually getting to the point of wanting to pull your hair out!

I would keep on struggling at first. Now I’ve realised that if you can’t figure out whats causing the issue within the first 20 mins or so, its a lost cause. Take a break. Get a smoke. Get some sleep. Move on to other tasks. And come back. This issue will still be there waiting around the next morning when you have a fresher mind.