Becoming a Better Developer

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your coding skills won’t either. Being a great developer takes a lot of practices and good habit formations. There will be days where you will feel completely overwhelmed, but just remember that it is a process. You will be alright, just trust the process.

If you are feeling lost, tired, or looking to improve your workflow then there is this great article by Level Up that talks about good habits to take notice of.

https://levelup.gitconnected.com/programming-habits-you-should-adopt-8ab75419fb09

If time is an issue below is a short summary of all the main points the author of LevelUp is trying to address.

Summary of the Article

• Don’t repeat yourself (DRY) If you feel like you have identical or duplicated code it is probably time to refactor. You can refactor by dividing your code and logic into smaller reusable units. This will make maintaining your code a lot easier and reduce the risk of introducing a bug.
• Once your done, refactor again As you can tell, refactoring is a big subject to being a better developer. You shouldn’t stingy with your code. If it looks like it can be written better, it probably can. This will improve the overall readability next time you or a new developer come and work on that project .
• Smaller commits In today’s society big is often considered better. For example bigger house or bigger wallet. In the world of code, bigger commits is not always better. The benefit of smaller commits is that you can be descriptive about what you did and how you implemented the code. In addition, it will make your code easier to debug and review.
• Stay Consistent If you are using snake_case to format your variables do not change halfway through to camelCase .
• Never Stop Learning New technologies emerge all the time that is just the life of a developer. The new hot tech stack of today might be dead five years from now. In order to stay relevant you will have to constantly keep learning. A great developer is a developer who never stops improving their skill set.