Top 10 Tips to Become Top-Performing Software Developers
There is an undeniable fact that some people were born with talents. Obviously, there is no exception in the technology industry. Some people have an instinctive gift to write software code that can be as much as an art in science.
However, tech leaders believe that it is not just talent that is needed to become the top software developers. In order to master writing good code, software developers need to be careful and methodical and have good habits and best practices. Fortunately, to become a great coder, people can learn to adopt these habits and practices.
This article will provide some specific tips that can help a software developer to become a great one.
1. Research before coding an application or feature
Top-quality software developers tend to start with research beforehand, and read documentation, instead of skipping this step and immediately jumping to code an app or feature. Good developers need to know how others developed a solution that can solve the problem they are dealing with, or else they might end up believing that what they did was the best and not willing to put more effort into practicing. Developers are suggested to spend more time doing the research before starting their coding journey.
2. Prioritize Simplicity
Looking for ways to simplify is an advanced step that is suggested to developers. Adding too many lines of code just makes things more complicated, and results in a new set of risks. Developers can write solutions with code consisting of fewer lines to optimize for simplicity. In reality, a smaller codebase has better performance and fewer errors. Additionally, it is much easier for all developers to read and maintain this kind of codebase.
3. Create features with quality and security
Not only do elite developers have an understanding of regulatory requirements, but they can also build in quality and security features. Companies whose code gets returned due to bad quality or security issues have to take responsibility for a big cost and liability. Therefore, developers need to be responsible for their practices by understanding all of the criteria that are required to create highly regarded business value.
4. Imagine being a new developer starting to write code
Developers should ensure the code will be simple and easy to understand. During the period of reviewing their code, good developers should put themselves in the shoes of new developers. The code will be considered as good if it is still understandable under new developers' eyes.
5. Have an understanding of the end-users
Most top-tier developers understand their users and can precisely foresee how their applications will be used by them. These developers are conscious of the end-user scenario and ensure that their code will provide a full reflection on the end-user scenario. That kind of customer empathy helps developers to craft high-quality code.
6. Design to accommodate all future changes
Smart developers will design code that is able to accommodate the continuous change in the unpredictable future, whilst other developers create brittle code that is costly to change. Smart developers have a thorough understanding of the problem, design software as a solution to solve that problem for today, and are willing to adopt it tomorrow. This indeed sounds difficult and only the best developers can master this.
7. Utilize The Latest Tools
Elite developers are recommended to get rid of obsolete tools and leverage the newest tools regarding code style, code documentation, guidelines, best practices, and performance checks. Top-notch developers need to keep up with the latest technologies and trends, as well as the most current integrated development environments (IDE), code quality, performance monitoring tools, and static and dynamic code analysis systems.
8. Have a customer interaction
Having frequent interaction with clients can help developers understand not only their customers' thoughts and opinions but also their reasons for choosing a product and how they will use it. Hence, interacting with customers will help developers produce better code. To cherish the impact of what they build while becoming proactive in solving problems in a creative way, developers should humanize the end user. Ultimately, it is the bond between humans with humans that propels the company forward!
9. Create ideas with a team
People used to believe that it only required a single coder to create revolutionary code. Today, what people used to believe may be true in certain cases. However, there is a shift in the paradigm for coding. In such a context, top-tier developers prefer working together with other elite developers. As a highly effective dev team, they leverage a meritocracy of ideas in order to collectively come up with the best solution to solve a problem.
10. Working with others despite having the different skillset
Several top-tier developers are not afraid of working with other developers who possess a different skill set. In fact, having teammates with different skills can help the team accomplish more goals and accelerate the team projects. Executives of companies should embrace putting developers with different backgrounds into a team and let them work together so that they can achieve a well-polished and attentive final product.
Bonus Tip - Maintain a focus on the most impactful tasks
Top-quality developers can recognize features that are needed immediately by clients. These features should be focused on first, whilst other features can be pushed to the backlog in order to be done later on. In order to save time for everyone in the team, the tasks that are the most impactful should be focused on by top-tier developers. Additionally, code that can be used in the future, is easily readable, extensible, and modular should be written by high-quality developers.
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