Programming Tips: Five Tools to Professional Coding

When shifting from coding as a hobby to full-fledged professional developing, here’s a set of tools one comes to appreciate. Discipline: Focusing on the task at hand and delivering it in a timely fashion and at an optimal state, becomes a major advantage one seeks in a professional coder, as opposed to a hobbyist who may write ingenious code but in an unreliable fashion. Priorities: Picking up one task, translates into dropping another. That should be obvious, but one’s modern-day multitasking mentality, tends to get in the way of it. However, rationalizing your timeframe means that when you’re working on one thing, you need to focus on it and not fragmentize your concentration on multiple goals. Head-on: When starting to deal with a new project, it’s always better to tackle its challenges head-on. Don’t shy away from the big issues, deal with them first, in order pen-out your workflow in the most detailed manner possible. This will help you plan out your approach, as well as acquire a sense of the time you’ll need to come up with a finished product. Less is more: A leaner solution will always have advantages over richer, but heavier swabs of code, not only because the latter is more susceptible to bugs and errors, but because its complications are certain to bloat you delivery times as well. In a deadline-driven profession, it’s vital to be able to separate between the necessary and the redundant. The border between the two is where you’ll find the best of coders cruising, but it’s a fine line to navigate, so better keep yourself on the right side of it on your first forays out in the wild. Goodbyes: Once a product is on the shelf, its shelf-time countdown begins. It’s important not to emotionalize with your work and get stuck on it with ad infinitum efforts to support and enhance it. Being prepared to let it go in due time is essential to moving forward in a technology driven word. Being pro-active about it is an extra plus.