Effective Developer habits

These are habits of effective developers. I gleaned a lot of this from the helms and peters podcast. I listened to this a couple years ago and again today. Really good stuff.

1 - Pursue professional growth. Always make time to attend conferences, trainings etc. Use the internet and its plethora of technical podcasts, articles, and blogs. There are so many skilled smart people who have been down the same path that you are on and have documented their experience.

2 - Think Google to help narrow down the search for related resources.

3 - Blog yourself. For me, its help A LOT to internalize things by writing them. Thats why this blog exist.

4 - Think user first. Do not let your vision take precedence over the user or client vision. Try to engage them as much as possible when gathering requirements.

5 - Prototype. If its a new product or functionality build the front end first. There is a lot of smart people who advocate for this "front to back development approach". Build the prototype, involve the client actively. We used to follow a process called FLIP, that emphasized the prototype first while iterating frequently with the customer until they say "thats it". There is no thought given to the implementation, language, DB or framework during the prototype. This process takes at least half of the entire product development life cycle.

6 - As a developer, do not assume superiority. Be amiable, supportive, encouraging. Believe that everyone who you come in contact with has something to offer.

7 - Think first, code second. Try to see the entire problem or big picture. Seek the birds eye view before starting coding or database development.

8 - Document. Not document your code, but code your documentation. Think hard about what is good documentation. Consider that someone else will be maintaining this code.