<p>Tony Patton gives new developers advice about the three topics that he feels cover the main areas of a development career. I had aninteresting discussion about junior developers recently with a group of grizzled IT veterans, and the conversation morphed into a lively debate on advice to give new developers. There were many valid points raised, and I narrowed them down to three tips for new developers. The tips cover these mainareas: technical, personal, and learning. 1: Develop abroad level of expertise</p><p>There are often numerous ways to solve programmingdilemmas; this includes solving a problem within one language or using otherlanguages and/or technologies. A broad range of experience with languages and technologies gives you a better perspective when facing new projects and situations.</p><p>Many years ago, I had an internship where Iworked extensively with Lotus Notes/Domino, OS/2, and DB/2. While some of thesetechnologies are no longer with us and others only have a faint pulse, working withthem was a major shift from my days in school working with C, Pascal, and othertraditional languages. Later I moved into this new thing called the World WideWeb, along with Java and Microsoft .NET and SQL Server much later.</p><p>I thinkworking with such varied technologies early gave me a good foundation forthinking outside of the box (we did things with Domino that was welloutside its defined scope). Furthermore, diving into the Internet waters early and jumping into Java gave me a great perspective for working with Microsoft .NET (specifically the Java knockoff C#) much later.</p><p><a href="http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/software-engineer/the-top-three-tips-for-new-developers/">Keep reading...</a></p>