Things that I wish I had known when I started out in the industry

I think there are some interesting things which I have learnt from my time as a developer. Some of them are nothing to do with code and some are very general but anyway, in no particular order this is my brief survival guide:

• Ask, ask, ask - until everyone is sick of you, until your manager wants to gauge out you eyes with a blunt spoon. Its the only way. Especially when you join a company, sure they want you to contribute... but mostly they want you to learn without destroying their clients confidence in the software! The bottom line is: managers actually prefer to be hassled all the time even if they don't realise it yet!
• Always, especially when you are very confident in code, add in try catches in appropriate places so that errors can be easily traced by you or other members of the team. In all fairness, I often find myself getting lazy with this sort of thing from day to day. When I have been away from back-end code and have had my head in CSS for sometime or I am deep in a large re-factor. But seriously, don't make your life difficult when code is released into the wild! Code which is silently failing is much more dangerous than code which is obviously broken.
• When writing complicated business logic always unit test. It will save your bacon later down the line. When you find a bug, write a new unit test.
• When writing unit tests always test from the lowest possible level up. If you are mocking loads and loads of objects, your code is probably too tightly coupled.
• Communication with other team members. Lets face it we all say things on our CV like "I am a great communicator" and "I won the first prize in spelling when I was 12", OK less the second one, but the point is, we all think we can talk to other people when necessary and get our point across. However, what about all the extra things? such as an estimation on time or a report on a technical challenge that was overcome? As a major technical resource for your company, they need you to speak up on what is going on. Sure, you should have a manager that does this for you, but why not help him out a bit and do it yourself?