Being a software developer is not an easy job. You might feel overwhelmed and you are easy to make mistakes if you are just new in this industry.
A common scenario for people with little to zero programming background is they don’t know what they are doing. Nevertheless, it can be an extremely high job satisfaction when you are able to solve the problem.
Today, we will focus on developers’ common mistakes and how to overcome them.
1. Debugging
You will get endless hours struggling to find the root cause of the problem if you just use print statements manually. Therefore, debugging is created to save you countless hours and also improve your code quality.
There are multiple ways to improve your debugging skills and avoid common mistakes:
- Get debugging tools. There are tons of tools available to use such as Chrome DevTools, Progress Telerik Fiddler, GDB (GNU Debugger) and SonarLint. However, learning new things can be challenging if you are new to debugging.
- Understand the error. There is a mistake you must avoid when debugging, don’t fix something you don’t understand. It is an inefficient way to debug. Instead, dig down to why it happened. Uncover the real reason causing that problem. This will help you know the solution in the future if ever something similar happens again. And also, gain a better understanding of programming.
- Get help: This is something that all programmers are hesitant to do. Getting help from some seniors/asking questions on a forum. Questions are a great way to get more specificity in your answers. This may challenge us, meanwhile, can bring out the best in us. Now, you will find debugging is an extremely important skill to master.
2. Bad Communication
The developer’s job just not only essential to develop software or website according to the user in software development. The importance of communication with the client is equal to or more important than the software by itself.
We often find ourselves in situations where we have not understood the user correctly. In the end, we do a lots of revisions or completely starting from scratch. We know it is nearly impossible for a software/website to fulfill what the client wants in a single try.
So, we strongly agree that take time to communicate and spare some thought for what the user wants is needed. Giving time and thought will reduce needless modifications happen or an unhappy clients.
After you have made it, there might be a few changes that might be required, but they would be not something as drastic as completely starting from scratch.
With proper requirement gathering, you have a better insight into what is required and therefore deliver better. Not to mention, do some beta testing of your app/website also helpful.
3. Declining Health
One of the common mistakes which every developer should avoid. Our brain needs a break, our eyes need rest, and our body requires exercise. Although we all know that hours of sitting in one position are not good in the long run. Still, developers are easy to forget their physical presence when they are focusing on programming.
The solution is to incorporate exercise into daily life. It doesn’t have to be a hard and intense workout, but anything like a light walk or stretches will make a night and day difference.
For me, we will take short breaks such as making a drink, going for a walk, or stretching my body Once with fresh my body, come back and start coding.
Also, some desks come with adjustable height, so you can use your PC while standing and avoid or reduce the sitting posture. Standing desks are a bonus for your health to prevent you from suffering health issues due to prolonged sitting.
4. Easily Readable Code
One thing we need to remember is that there will be other people as well reading our code, we need to consider them too. Therefore, write readable code that is easy for others to read the same for us as well.
If you still don’t understand the importance of writing clean code, try reading some rubbish code from the internet, or the code that you wrote a year back.
There are guidelines, rules, and best practices to follow so that everyone will understand the code, no matter who wrote it.
Another mistake we do is code repetition. Repeating the same code is not a good approach, it is one of the basic programming principles to keep your code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself), but for some reason, we still do it anyway.
For example, when you made changes to the code, but then find out that the same method was duplicated in a different file and thus not updated there. Think of the codebase being larger. A readable code can save you from making changes to thousand different places.
You are helping someone else who reads/maintains the code you wrote in the development stages. It is a sign of mature and good developers.
5. Not Using Version Control
As a developer, you need to know version control. It is a process of recording the changes being made to the program or project so that it is possible to go back to a specific version you want.
We often have to face that when new changes are made, bugs are found, or sometimes the entire website/program crashes. In this scenario, version control is helpful. The most common version control is Git.
When working at a company, they use some version control system, but developers ignore or don’t use it when working on individual projects or freelancing. And this results in serious problems.
Conclusion
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