Write Code as If You Had to Support It for the Rest of Your Life
You could ask 97 people what every programmer should know and do, and you might hear back 97 distinct answers. This could be both overwhelming and intimidating at the same time. All advice is good, all principles are sound, and all stories are compelling, but where do you start? More important, once you have started, how do you keep up with all the best practices you've learned and how do you make them an integral part of your programming practice?
I think the answer lies in your frame of mind or, more plainly, in your attitude. If you don't care about your fellow developers, testers, managers, sales and marketing people, and end users, then you will not be driven to employ Test-Driven Development or write clear comments in your code, for example. I think there is a simple way to adjust your attitude and always be driven to deliver the best quality products:
Write code as if you had to support it for the rest of your life.
That's it. If you accept this notion, many wonderful things will happen. If you were to accept that any of your previous or current employers had the right to call you in the middle of the night, asking you to explain the choices you made while writing the fooBar method, you would gradually improve toward becoming an expert programmer. You would naturally want to come up with better variable and method names. You would stay away from blocks of code comprising hundreds of lines. You would seek, learn, and use design patterns. You would write comments, test your code, and refactor continually. Supporting all the code you'd ever written for the rest of your life should also be a scalable endeavor. You would therefore have no choice but to become better, smarter, and more efficient.
If you reflect on it, the code you wrote many years ago still influences your career, whether you like it or not. You leave a trail of your knowledge, attitude, tenacity, professionalism, level of commitment, and degree of enjoyment with every method and class and module you design and write. People will form opinions about you based on the code that they see. If those opinions are constantly negative, you will get less from your career than you hoped. Take care of your career, of your clients, and of your users with every line of code — write code as if you had to support it for the rest of your life.
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