A Good Developer

What it makes to be a good developer? This question keeps popping now and then in my mind especially when I hear complaints from managers and leads saying their developers are not good enough. In Sun Tech Days couple of years back, there was a session according to which below are the 7 best habits of a good developer.

1. Understanding the Problem
2. Use appropriate tool
3. Strive for Simplicity
4. Keep your code clean
5. Learn to debug
6. Leverage whatever available
7. Plan ahead

Lets discuss these in the context of general projects in Indian service industry

1. Understand requirements. This doesn't mean developer must have domain knowledge and understand business requirements but at least they must understand what should be done on click of Submit, click on Cancel, what formatting and validations need be done etc

2. Tools should have been decided before development start so lets not dwell much on this

3. 'Think Simple' - I keep telling my developers. Your performance is not measured based on number of lines you code or how complex your logic is.

4. Learn to code lean and clean code. This is possible only when following coding standards becomes a practice rather than compulsion. Also developer should emphasize on learning programming than programming language. I don't mean we don't have to learn any language but if you don't know how to solve a problem and write a basic algorithm there is no use of becoming an expert in Syntax of any language. Again you don't have to solve complex issues. Take for example age validations, if you don't know how to calculate age is there any use even if you know whole Date API in Java? Also emphasis more and more going in getting things done than on how? If developer gets a function point implemented that's enough, we rarely see leads reviewing for algorithm or developers caring to analyze their logic. No one to blame because of time lines but if you want to become a good developer your logic and its performance does matter a lot. Remember the Algorithmic subject thought in college and the order of executions?

5. Debug the code - No one writes a perfect code in one shot. With the latest IDEs and plug-ins debugging is easy than coding.

6. Leverage whatever available - Most of the things we do these days we are not the first ones doing them (Unless you are lucky like me). Refer organization's reusable repository, colleagues experience or online community to get the code. God had given us Google and a brain to use it.
7. No need to stress about time lines... Think and plan ahead. One of my professor used to emphasize to have complete algorithm written on paper and analyzed before even writing single line of code. Plan should include similar thing.. plan what to be coded and how to so that you wont end up with rework or stuck in middle.

To summarize, to become a good developer first thing to learn is problem solving (say analytical skills or whatever). Learn from all possible sources (read open source code, online material etc).

As Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie say.. "only way to learn programming language by programing in it".

Any training can teach you API but not thinking.....