Close, but no cigar!. Eavesthough - is just what it says, a trough along the eaves of a house to catch and direct rainwater. In the U.S. it's called a gutter, true, but the translation doesn't go both ways :) It's been a long time since I lived in England, but I believe the roadside rain catcher is called a gutter there too.

To be a good developer: 1. Understand that you will never stop learning. Everything changes rapidly and it is extremly easy to get left behind. 2. But... The basics of good programming don't change. Whatever problem you are given has to be broken down to managble segments and solved piece by piece. Languages are not overly important, most have very similar constructs and features and programming skills should be lanugage agnostic to a large degree. 3. Test. Test. Test. Very rarely will you write a piece of code that actually works correctly under all condtions in one try. Assume that whatever you write will have bugs in it, so exercise it and test the boundaries. Also remember that you never trust that the input (at any level) is what you expect, check and verify it. 4. Listen. To the people around you that have experience, their war stories can help you avoid making similar errors. In time you will have your own. To your customers. For most programming jobs, you will be creating programs to supporting your employer. You will need to learn enough of the details of how the business operates that you can understand and correctly interpret the requests being made for computerized solutions. This means becoming comfortable with the terminology, processes etc. that allow the business to operate. Many of the people making such requests are not computer literate and will make assumptions on how or what the computer will do that are not in fact possible. Your job is to take the initial request and determine exactly what is desired, then get the computer to do it, or, show why the request is not solvable (logical inconsistency, invalid assumptions, etc.) and work to redefine 5. Make sure your logic is complete. For instance: When you write an if statement, make sure you consider the else portion as well. I can't tell you how many times I've seen issues where the else was missing and something unexpected occured when the if condtion evaluated fale. If no action is needed for the else, put in a comment to that effect, it will at least show that you considered that path. For loops, (depending on the type of loop construct), you consider the case where the loop never executes because the termination condition was reached before entry to the loop. 6. Use the people around you. If you are stuck with an issue, try to explain it to a co-worker, sometimes they can assist, but more often, having to explain it will allow you to solve it because you have to think it through fro