If you are looking to excel as a developer, lose these habits right now because they can affect your performance personally and professionally
To grow as a developer, you must practice these 3Ps to progress — passion, patience and persistence. Lack one of those elements and it’ll put you yards away from becoming a great developer. Your habits define the type of developer you groom yourself to be. So, it is important to fathom healthy developer habits.
As humans, we all are accustomed to look for quick ways to become successful but, in the case of developers there are no shortcuts to achieve greatness. We are hardwired to learn by prospects of getting high salary jobs and this mindset triumphs the essence of learning to code.
Moreover, companies and high-growth startups look for the quality in the skills of developers rather than education and work experience. So, it is important to lose a few habits in the process of shaping yourself into a great developer.
1) They are learning tutorials not ‘SURE’torials
Like every budding developer, everyone heads to youtube to watch programming tutorials right after compiling their first <Hello World!> program. While there’s nothing wrong with watching tutorials, completely relying on them doesn’t render actual learning.
Depending on tutorials as a beginner is more dangerous because when you start out coding, there’s a lot of enthusiasm and most of it will be consumed by the time you spend watching tutorials.
Writing a 10-line code snippet will teach you more than watching a tutorial on how to write a complex code in 100 lines. Since programming is a solution-oriented thought-based activity, you can’t learn it through visual medium.
It is necessary to practice and explore different ways after watching tutorials.
So, remember that they are just learning tutorials not ‘sure’torials — they don’t ensure a conclusive learning experience until you actually start coding with your fingertips.
2) #include<basics.io> before building MAANG clones
Wanting for things to happen right away with minimal effort has become a fundamental human tendency and this behavior is extensively prevalent. The attention span or the focus quotient is quite low in millennials and Gen Z communities. It is clearly an outcome of the applications we use on a daily basis, they have made people used to instant results to suffice their need for immediate gratification.
But, this approach fails when you want to become a great developer. You can only learn through study and practice and this is why you require patience to grow skills.
Take it slow, don’t start building FAANG (or MAANG, since Facebook is Meta now!) clones or complicated projects right away. Strengthen your basics in coding and system architecture before leaping into the big leagues of learning.
3) Physique matters — even for code
Code structure is a very important aspect of software development that many developers choose to ignore. While programming, it doesn’t matter if it’s a small or large project, structuring your code is very critical because it determines the durability and management of your code for future purposes.
Navigating through unstructured code files to look for issues and solve them will be a difficult task to perform.
Structuring your code only improves the handling factor of the projects.
4) Document it — Don’t be lazy!
Documentation is one of the most underrated dev tasks. The perspective which considers technical documentation as a burden has to be altered because documentation for the projects of today navigate future developers and engineers in the right direction.
With informative technical documentation dockets, future developers can be easily trained too and project handling will run smoothly even without the core team.
So, put more effort into documenting your solutions & designs.
5) Be a getter, not a quitter!
Not being able to come up with solutions right away doesn’t make you a bad developer; giving up too soon does.
Software development is a deep thought based activity, it takes time to figure out the what’s and how’s.
Over time, it only gets better as you groom your knowledge with practice and gain experience.
So, don’t let yourself down if you are not able to code solutions immediately and never make the mistake of giving up. This one applies not just for developers but to everyone in general.
So, now you know what habits to avoid and here’s one more tip on how to sharpen your skills with real-world micro-projects.
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