I've worked in a variety of companies as employee and consultant and I have some counterintuitive advice that applies to building things on the web: In almost a

I've worked in a variety of companies as employee and consultant and I have some counterintuitive advice that applies to building things on the web: In almost all cases, things like code maintainability, coding "standards", and TDD, go out the window during actual development. I'm not saying this is good, just that it happens (this is more a management problem than a software development one). There are deadlines to meet, changes to make, surprise features to add, etc. And usually you're just throwing things away and building new things before any of this comes back to bite you. Being able to go with the flow and handle chaos --flexibility-- is probably the most important skill to have. The job ends up being a lot of communication. If you're lucky, you'll get to code some cool stuff. But you'll also have to hardcode something clunky and ugly because there was no time to do it right. Be OK with that.