portal entry

          Grae, I believe you were a guide for CF2019 Certification? Because you did such a fantastic job, here are my two cents: EDITOR Stepping through one's code via a Line-Stepper,  was a revelation to me when I first started. And quite a helpful (time-saver) in debugging, especially when stuck.   So, I'd recommend spinning up the CF Builder  for your developer with RDS enabled. GUIDEPOSTS Writing code doesn't take much effort.  Writing gobbs of code is easy. Maintaining & scaling gobs of spaghetti code is hard and expensive. LAYERING Impress upon your Padawan that the business rules matter-most. Business requirements change at a rapid pace in any life cycle.  It's best the business of the code is at the surface.  Press all the technical stuff down. OOP Continuing on this track: Perhaps impress upong them the value of wrapper functions; classes (Components), pattern recognition, and in general OOP modeling up front and you'll get better results without having to re-write everything they touch. HUMAN FACTORS - A PILOTS PERSPECTIVE I no longer discount how frail we are and on the other hand how much we can accomplish when we are energized and ready. Obtaining a pilots (Airplane) license requires serious lessons in Human Factors and Decision Making.  I spent twenty years programming and then I got my pilots license.  I approach coding somewhat differentlty since then.  The value of procedures and human factors hit a new bar with me. I think about how faitgued I am when choosing my next project and how much energy I have to devote to a task.   Make them take breaks.  Especially, when they get stuck or struggle. OWNERSHIP Give them solid direction on the business policies and make them own-the-code, own the application & ultimately own the system is my best advice. PRINCIPLES You will likely start your padawan on small scopable projects up to bigger tasks including systems management.   When they move up the chain: The physicists and rocket-builders are big on first principles and boiling all things away before construction.   Psuedo-code and the occaisional code review will go a long way to getting principled code. I am a huge fan of these principles in building big projects: 1.known to unknown; 2.simple to complex; 3.concrete to abstract; 4.easy to difficult; 5.familiar to unfamiliar.      

Comment by jBrodeur

Thanks for the comment.  I wish i were good enough to have been one of the certification teachers.  I was in there though getting my certification so we may have been in the same room. I neglected to mention that I definitely would make sure to familiarize the new developer with a MVC framework.  I currently use FW/1 but am planning on trying Coldbox again soon.  Any existing project he touches will be in a framework so he will be picking that up as well.  So spaghetti code will definitely be a no go and would advise the same to anyone else getting a new developer started. I like your list of principles and advice on ownership.  As it is a grad student who will be going out in the wide world I am planning on giving him his own projects to own and let him present to me as the client to help him learn to take a project from start to finish.

Comment by Grae Desmond