When I started there was lots of smoke 😀 it’s true that you can easily accumulate random stuff, but I still think it’s better to have spares of the things I use than risking running out and waiting for a delivery. Maybe I’m just disorganised.

When you buy components, buy a bag of them. Good for when you let the smoke out of one, and you can have several projects on the go at a time.

Remember that you are also interviewing them. They won’t expect you to know all the answers, but will want someone that they can work with. If you can, answer questions with the STAR method (situation, task, approach, result), but don’t waffle. You can use one piece of experience in a variety of ways: teamwork, research, urgent deadline etc.

It’s ok to say that you are nervous, they should try to put you at ease.

You may be asked ‘trick questions’, these are not usually to to you up but to see how you work an unknown problem. There is no right answer. Not knowing stuff is ok. Not being able to think up a plan is less so.

Remember whatever the outcome, this is really useful experience. See if you can get a site tour, ask about the tech used… You can then add this to your knowledge for later. In my experience, industry is frequently several years ahead of academia so you get a good chance to understand the real world.

There’s a good chance that it’s the capacitors in the PSU that have failed. It’s always the caps! Should be a very doable repair.

Thought I did so well on my phone. It kept auto correcting code to coffee. Maybe it was telling me something.

Yes, plan for it!

All the other comments are great advice. As an ex chemist who does quite a bit of code I’ll add:

Do you want code that works, or code that works?! It’s reasonably easy to knock out ugly code that only works once, and that can be just what you need. It takes a little more effort however to make it robust. Think about how it can fail and trap the failures. If you’re sharing code with others, this is even more important a people do ‘interesting’ things.

There’s a lot of temporary code that’s had a very long life in production, this has technical debt… Is it documented? Is it stable? Is it secure? Ideally it should be

Code examples on the first page of Google tend to work ok, but are not generally secure, e.g doing SQL queries instead of using prepared statements. Doesn’t take much extra effort to do it properly and gives you peace of mind. We create sboms for our code now so we can easily check if a component has gained a vulnerability. Doesn’t mean our code is good, but it helps. You don’t really want to be the person who’s code helped let an attacker in.

Any code you write, especially stuff you share will give you a support and maintenance task long term. Pirate for it!

Code sometimes just stops working. - at least I’m my experience. Sacrifice something to the gods and all will be fine.

Finally, you probably know more than you think. You’ve plenty of experience. Most of the time I can do what I need without e.g. classes, but sometimes I’ll intentionally use a technique in a project just to learn it. I can’t learn stuff if I don’t have a use for it.

I’m still learning, so if I’ve got any part of the above wrong, please help me out.