Some good programming habits that will make you a better developer
We always want to be better programmers, and we focus a lot on the technical part such as learning a new framework or deepening our knowledge we already have in a programming language. In addition to writing code, many other factors or habits will help us be better developers.
Write legible and clean code: When I started programming I had the innocent idea that I would always be programming new software from the beginning, designing each of the views and even the database, but the reality turned out to be very different. As software developers, 90% of our work will be focused on maintaining existing systems, probably fixing an error that the client reported, or modifying a view to add new functionality. All this work that involves code already created by other people many years ago requires a long time to understand it and then modify it or correct a bug. It is very common to find code that will require a long time to understand, because it is very poorly done, knowing this, we must take the habit of always ensuring that each line of code we write is easy to understand, since in some cases in faraway future a software developer will be maintaining the software we made and we don’t want him to waste a lot of time understanding what we did. This task of understanding the code is one of the most common causes that can affect the productivity of programmers.
Improve existing code: As I mentioned earlier we must write clean and readable code, but what should we do if the current software code is very messy? The best we can do is improve it. When you are working on a task, and you come up with a way to improve the existing code, you should not think twice, this is a quality that I have seen in many software developers, which makes the difference between a person who does what is necessary, and the one that does more than expected.
Plan before you act: In our daily life we are very used to rushing to finish whatever we are doing faster, maybe in some cases this can really help us finish faster, but in the world of software development things do not work that way. It is a complete waste of time to avoid planning what we are going to do, since it may happen that we start programming, and halfway through the work, we realize that what we were doing does not work for a certain reason and we have to undo what we did and look for other solution. This is the typical situation in which we must do the job twice for not doing it right from the beginning, in this case for the reason of avoiding planning.
The habits mentioned above are not so difficult to do, we simply have to take them into account during our work and this will generate a great improvement in our work.
