These tips and tricks will help you improve your programming and coding skills, which are essential to becoming a good Java developer. These tips are useful to core Java developers as well as Java Web developers.

Learn Java 8

Unfortunately, most of them are experienced Java developers with 7 to 10 years of experience. I understand that learning is slow at certain stages in your career, but if you don’t take action now, you will be left behind.

Almost all Java development jobs now require Java 8 skills, and if you don’t have them, it’s hard to do well.

2. Learn the Spring Framework (Spring Boot)

It also advances best practices such as dependency injection to make your applications easier to test, a key requirement of modern software.

Study unit tests

A good and professional Java developer will almost always write unit tests for their code, and if they really are a rock star developer, you can see it in their code and tests.

Testing also has a long way to go, and Java developers can use a variety of unit testing, integration testing, and automated testing tools.

You can spend a lot of time honing your Java testing skills, but for those new to the Java world and unit testing, JUnit is the best library. The latest version (JUnit 5) is both powerful and flexible, as every Java developer should know.

4. Learn apis and libraries

Java is the most popular and mature programming language in the world, and there are a number of libraries and apis available to perform almost any operation.

Of course, you shouldn’t know all of this, but you should be familiar with some key apis, such as JSON processing apis (such as Jackson and Gson), XML processing apis (such as JAXB and Xerces), and unit test libraries (such as Mockito and JUnit).

If you don’t know them, you can learn or at least learn them in 2018. First, you can view my list of 20 Java libraries that every Java developer should know, including libraries from key areas such as parsing, bytecode manipulation, concurrency, collections, and so on

5. Understand the internal structure of the JVM

If you know the JVM like the back of your hand, you can write robust and high-performance Java applications, which is what rock star Java developers do.

As part of that, you should also learn how to analyze Java applications and find performance bottlenecks.

For structured learning, I recommend Scott Oaks’ “The Definitive Guide to Java Performance,” a great book I’ve read over the past few years.

6. Learn design patterns

By understanding and incorporating them into your code, you can make your application more flexible and easier to change in the future.

It also improves overall code quality and documentation because other Java developers are familiar with design patterns. As a result, they will quickly understand your solution.

However, don’t just focus on the code part, understand the spirit and creativity. Use Java 8 features such as Lambdas and Streams to override schemas.

7. Learn DevOps tools

Understanding DevOps is critical for modern Java developers. You should be at least familiar with continuous integration and deployment and how Jenkins can help achieve this goal.

This becomes even more important for advanced Java developers, who are typically responsible for setting coding best practices and creating environments, building scripts, and guidelines.

I also recommend that you take the time to learn more about DevOps and tools like Docker, Chef, Kubernetes, as well as Maven and Jenkins.

If you need some resources, then Udemy’s Devos and Developers’ Jenkins CI are probably the best courses. You can learn more about Maven and Jenkins as well as CI and CD.

8. Learning Kotlin

It inspired me to learn Scala, and I later tried Groovy because of its increased use for creating build scripts and unit tests.

This experience has helped me a lot, which is why I encourage Java developers to learn the new JVM language. I’ve previously blotted about the three JVM languages Java developers should learn in 2018, but if you’re in a hurry, go learn Kotlin.

It’s an excellent language from JetBrains, the company behind IntelliB IDEA, and the official language for Android development announced by Google in 2017.

It can not only improve your productivity, but also help you get into Android development. If you want to study Kotlin in 2018 and look for some good resources, here is a list of Kotlin courses.

Learn about microservices

Now is the time for Java developers to learn about microservices architecture and how to create microservices in Java to take advantage of this latest wave.

Fortunately, the Spring Framework provides Spring Cloud and Spring Boot, which greatly simplifies microservice development in Java.

If you are looking for a course, starting Microservices with Spring Boot is a good place to start.

Also, if books are more your thing, I recommend you check out Josh Long’s Cloud Native Java, which provides a comprehensive guide to developing Cloud applications.

10. Learn development tools better

Since ides such as Eclipse, NetBeans, and IntelliJ IDEA are the most important tools for Java programmers, it makes sense to spend some time learning more about them