9 Simple Tips to Help You Succeed in Your Programming Career
This is how programmers get really good and have a successful career.
Good, better, the best! The idea of performance is deeply rooted in our thinking. Not everyone has to be the very best at everything — they desire to be good at one’s own activities. However, it is part of most people’s everyday life.
That is understandable because only good will ultimately be successful, get the dream job, and earn a lot of money. Regardless of what your personal goals are, it can also be fun to improve.
There are different types of learning, and the starting point of individual developers is completely different. Some might want to improve their methodology. Others might want to improve the quality of the code. So there are many starting points for anyone who wants to get better. And one of them is just being really lazy!
1. Find a work-life balance
In addition, performance on the job can also be influenced by factors that have nothing to do with development itself. Only those who are healthy and balanced can perform at their best; only those who come to rest once can perform in the long term. A good work-life balance should be sought, even if this is particularly difficult for those who love their job.
In addition to development, there should also be room for other activities in your own life: a little sport, time for friends, that contributes to relaxation. In addition, a reasonably healthy diet is a good idea to stay healthy in the long term. Developers should also pay attention to good sleep — when rested, the brain is much more productive. Of course, this does not mean that nights you have worked through are not allowed — but should not become standard.
2. Bad habits
But what happens to errors that are then found? Many developers tend to leave a comment in the code when a bug cannot be fixed immediately. This is a bad idea: who still thinks about it when the next three bugs have surfaced? Errors must always be noted, at least in the backlog. In addition, the later a bug is addressed, the more difficult it becomes to resolve. Good developers make sure that it doesn’t get that far in the first place!
In addition to dealing with bugs, many developers have bad habits. What smoking is in relation to one’s own (developer) health can be in terms of code handling of comments and standards? Any work on the code should also include the thought that the project must be easy to maintain in the long term.
So comments are not a good idea for bugs; however, they are likely to be used more frequently in many other places.
3. A matter of attitude
The right attitude towards the job is also important. Nobody is at something they hate — but very few developers are likely to be either. It is also clear that not every project in the job is so exciting that everyone is enthusiastic about it.
Going about the development with a certain amount of enthusiasm is worth looking for the right niche. Projects often still offer the opportunity to set a specific focus or to delve into a particular task.
And if that doesn’t work, developers can still fall back on the aforementioned ideas and keep their love of the subject alive through open-source projects until the job’s task better matches their interests.
But it’s not just about the love of the job. Anyone who thinks they already know everything learns nothing more; Those who feel superior to their colleagues are not looking for an exchange.
So only those who are aware of their strengths and weaknesses can be really good at their job. Humility is just as important for a good developer as the perseverance necessary to solve complex problems.
4. Make mistakes
Mistakes are part of everyday work. Nobody gets everything right, especially new tasks quickly present even experienced developers with major challenges.
In agile work, mistakes are seen as an opportunity to learn from them — and that is exactly the right attitude. If you try something new and take a risk instead of staying on the familiar path, you will learn and improve your skills.
Many developers have limits when it comes to experiments. The project needs to be driven forward. The deadline is approaching. Time and money are important, not personal development. That leaves little room for anything new.
To create space for themselves to start tinkering, developers can work on open source projects. There are always new challenges that lie beyond the familiar field of activity; mistakes are usually not as tragic as when the project has to be handed in soon.
5. Think outside the box
This also applies to learning new techniques. Developers, of course, never stop learning anyway. After all, updates and new techniques have to be mastered repeatedly to stay up to date.
A look beyond the boundaries of your own core area can help keep the ability to learn high so that familiarization with the new functions of a language after an update is not too difficult.
Anyone who does not work agile as a freelancer can, for example, take a look at agile techniques and think about which of them fit the way of working. Anyone who has already mastered this can learn new (programming) languages or at least a second language — and maybe even leave the world of programming languages and turn to natural languages.
6. Take your time!
It takes time to react to errors that occur at any time and keep an eye on one’s own habits. Developers should take them. Of course, this proposal is often difficult to implement — a clear “no” to tight deadlines can be a good starting point to increase code quality. For this, it is worthwhile to communicate this relationship to superiors and the customer clearly: Excessive speed and high quality are mutually exclusive.
So if the customer’s goal is perfect code, they have to give more time. But what exactly should the product look like in the end? There are the specifications of the customer. There is the product vision, but what about this specific feature?
In practice, many developers know less about exactly where they are going than they should. There is great potential for optimization here for everyone who wants to get better at their job.
Before starting a project, it is important to ask many questions, maybe even to develop a prototype. If you know exactly where you want to go, you can work on it in a more targeted manner. This enables a focus on the essentials, which in turn saves time.
7. Look for an exchange
Another advantage of participating in such projects is the exchange that takes place. Personal communication is also one of the basics of agile work; the detailed discussion of problems and possible solutions sometimes falls by the wayside.
Those who want to get better benefit from it in two ways: on the one hand, thinking about others’ problems helps to keep their own knowledge fresh; on the other hand, foreign approaches to solving their own problems can reveal new ways of thinking.
In this respect, developers should make sure that they regularly schedule times in their job to talk to colleagues about difficulties with the project. Beyond that, it can also be useful to join the discussion on platforms such as Stackoverflow. The brain works like a muscle in some ways. Those who frequently deal with cognitive challenges stay mentally fit.
8. Make targeted use of laziness
In addition, developers shouldn’t shy away from simply being really lazy. The best solutions to a problem are often not even particularly complex but rather impress with their simplicity. Lazy people usually know the shortest path to their destination, and it doesn’t always have to be bad. Think simple, look for the path with the least amount of effort: These are quickly lost strategies in complex projects.
To be lazy at the same time and increase the quality of the results, it is possible, for example, to use tools. Every developer does that anyway; however, the question is always whether the current tools are ideal for the project. There are tools of their own for different purposes. Good syntax highlighting is a must-have. Libraries that help reduce unnecessary lines of code can also be a good choice. And who knows really well what the browser’s developer tools can do?
9. Test
One of the skills that many developers could develop at some point in writing tests. Of course, every code is tested; this is standard in agile work. But here, too, there are differences: Test-Driven-Development is not used everywhere, but it can make sense to keep the code as bug-free as possible.
Unit tests are an important building block for improving the quality of the code. So if you want to work on your skills at this level, you should consider doing a few more tests.
The question also arises as to whether tests should be carried out automatically or manually. Anyone who tests automatically saves a lot of effort, of course. However, if you want to look at the project from a completely new perspective, you should rather switch to manual testing and writing tests over and over again, preferably before the code is ready.
This list is not an exhaustive consideration of how developers can improve their skills. Technical aspects such as learning programming languages, which are particularly in demand at the moment, are of course just as important as taking care of your own health.
Sometimes just changing employers will help you get good at your job again — because even the best developer cannot use his talents for the wrong tasks.
So if you want to work on your own skills, you can do it in many ways. Only one thing is not true — applying the idea of laziness to one’s abilities. While this can be useful in terms of code, skills only improve if you work on it.
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