How do you review and refine your development practices?

Publish Date: Dec 30 '19

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I'm reading a fascinating book at the moment called Atomic Habits by James Cleer (very highly recommended by the way).

Towards the end, he talks about athletes like Katie Ledecky and Eilud Kipchoge who even after all their success still review and record every single training session and look for improvements.

I'm interested to hear how my fellow devs keep themselves honest.

I personally find once a way of coding has been mastered you fall into habits which may be good or bad.

I'm trying to fathom a way to quantify it (like recording the number of reps you would as an athlete) but can't think of anything accurate enough

Comments 6 total

James EasthamDec 31, 2019

Hey Trifon, thanks for the response. Yeah, I think quantify might have been the wrong word. But I was just thinking about tangible ways to track progress.

I love the idea of talking to other devs and sharing ideas, part of the reason I'm active on this site. But from a personal perspective, to be able to some how look at your own work and have some metric on whether you are 'progressing' or not could be really interesting.

Code reviews feel like the right way to do it. But even that is difficult when the company you work for is very small and as a freelancer you are just one person.

Really appreciate the comment though, food for thought.
James EasthamJan 1, 2020

Ooooo I do like that metric. That's a great shout.

I remember in my early days of Dev there was a lot of copy and paste and no clue what's going on.

Up until reasonably recently I was the same with things like async/await. Did it because everyone does.

Love that though! Really appreciate your input, thanks Trifon.
JWPJan 1, 2020

For me, I read every programming style book that interested me. Then I had to parse fact from fiction. So after a few years I Had a pretty good idea for what patterns were right.

Then through just one rule, I gained the most. The Single Responsibility Pattern along with refactoring tools did the trick.

Where did I wind up? The pattern that emerged was that of Functional programming. Lots of small functions that do only one thing.

How long did it take me? 20 years. How long have I been a Functional programmer? 10 years.

Is it the right way to go? Absolutely.
- James EasthamJan 1, 2020
  
  Thanks for the input John! I'm definitely seeing myself following a similar pattern as far as the smaller functions go.
  
  Improves legibility and ease of reading so much just having 10 lines of code to read instead of 100. Combine small functions with descriptive method names and really on a winner.

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James Eastham @jeastham1993

How do you review and refine your development practices?

Comments 6 total