"Another thing my mentor did was took me with him to meetings where we reviewed the code. Getting to know your users and understand who you're doing this for is

"Another thing my mentor did was took me with him to meetings where we reviewed the code. Getting to know your users and understand who you're doing this for is incredibly important. So many organizations try to abstract them away. It was something that put a face to the end user, and gave the user confidence in us to understand what they needed. I've seen a lot of folks not have that opportunity, and want to build ivory tower software without ever talking to a user. It also makes the job much more rewarding." A great thing I forgot about; when I got my first job I was dying to meet clients and learn how to start a project, rather than just being told "this is what you're doing". I'll definitely bring him in on (relevant) meetings and let him have his say.