How to be a good programmer? 10 golden rules

rafaello (35)in #programmer • 7 years ago (edited)

More and more often we can see that programmer has 10 years experience, but is he worth better salary? If someone works in a huge corporation and works on the same position for 10 ten years without changing any business area only gets promotion. I think that person is one the 2-3 years experience developer, because he doesn't develop himself. The question is why junior developer can’t receive the same salary as senior developer who did nothing for 10 years? Below I’d like to describe how not to become programmer wreck.

1. You should have fundamental knowledge

I know that most of us hasn't finished computer science or technology university. But the way to get basic knowledge is reading documentation, and how someone else solve similar problems to us. Maybe he uses better solution to solve it. Of course we can get it from university, sometimes university is little boring because we don’t want to learn old languages. You can find your mentor which can learn you fundamental knowledge. In my opinion it’s the best option because he will learn you the latest technology.

2. You should help others members in a team

If someone has a problem You can be his programming duck :) . It brings benefits for you and for him. Because he can explain you a problem(Often it is enough to find a solution). You can describe how you can solve it. It directs to create nice solution. The nice way is to use pair programming technique. Where one person write a code, another thinks about solution. It’s great but sometimes it’s hard to share a keyboard.

3. You should write simple but logical code

Readable and tested code is the best code in the whole world. I can really recommend a book “Clean code” Robert C. Martin. The name of variables, class and functions should be clear for programmer.

4. You should spend more time to analyze a problem then You will spend less time to fix it.

Often we try to code in that moment, but it’s the worst moment to code. If we don’t analyze a problem enough, we will spend a lot of time to fix bugs of bugs. First of all we should focus on analyzing a problem then to code a solution.

5. Always read documentation

I’ve met a lot of cases where should I read first a documentation but I haven’t read it. It seemed to be that something works as i wanted but unfortunately it didn’t.

6. You should read someone else code

The best way to do this is making a lot of code reviews. During this process you learn another programmer code style. You can see where he makes a mistakes. You can tell him what’s good and wrong in his code. It’s the best area to share your opinion

7. Don’t be afraid to ask for help

Don’t lead to situation where you ask for help too late. You need to know when to ask someone. Don’t be shy and don’t be afraid to ask, Nobody will laugh.

8. Don’t use copy-paste method from stackoverflow

Stackoverflow is great website, has a lot of great solution, but in better programmer level it’s good enough. We need to think if stackoverflow solution helps us.