Hey guys in this articles we will look at those bad habits to avoid as developer and these are things that I’ve dealt with myself and I’ve also seen many other developers deal with so my hope for this article is that if you’re just starting out you can avoid developing these habits and if you are already a seasoned developer and you have some of these habits that you can at least be aware of it and try to work on them .

Not taking enough breaks

Okay so number one is not taking enough breaks and I know that most of us are guilty of this especially if you’re a hard worker but sometimes you can overwork yourself and be actually be less productive so I’ve had periods of time where I’ve sat down around 6:00 a.m. and maybe got up a couple of times for lunch and just to go to the bathroom and work straight up until nighttime you know six seven at night and that was common almost every day and I think we’ve all done some ridiculous hours when we had a time crunch and something was do maybe the next day that’s kind of rare occasion and that’s not what I’m talking about I’m talking more about your everyday habits okay so each day I would really suggest trying and to try to take frequent breaks I can’t say a specific plan for everyone because everyone’s different but in a general sense I’d say around every hour or so just get up stretch your legs walk around get a coffee get something to eat a lot of times if you’re stuck on something and you take a little break come back to it the solution will come to you easier after you give you a brain a little rest so just try to figure out what works for you and even if you don’t think you need to take breaks just try it out you might find that you’re more productive and you can think a little a little clearer.

Refusing to ask for Help

So number two is refusing to ask number two applies to both learning and learning if you’re in college or boot-camp it also applies in the real workplace and many of us don’t ask for help for various reasons I think a big reason is pride and just the fear of looking like you don’t know what you’re doing many of us have impostor syndrome where we don’t feel fully qualified for our positions I know that I felt like this in both a company setting and dealing directly with clients and even doing courses and tutorials I felt like this so asking for help it kind of reaffirms that insecure feeling and I think that’s why a lot of us don’t do it but in reality it’s wasting a lot of your time and it’s hindering your growth having other real developers around you to answer questions is just as much or even a better resource than having a tutorial or video or a book they can directly answer your questions and really help you understand it and the only people who would criticize you for asking for help would be complete assholes and I try to avoid those people anyway so don’t be afraid to ask if you need it.

Stop being a student

So number three is when we stop being a student and I don’t care if you’ve been a senior developer for twenty years you should always think of yourself as a student more so than other professions because this one is always changing there’s no developer that knows everything about anything and even if you get to the point where you do something’s gonna change the next day and you’re no longer gonna know everything about that particular topic if you get complacent and you stop reading and learning you’ll fall behind and even if you have a job that doesn’t need you to learn anything new like let’s say you build the same type of projects with the same software the same version and all that stuff if you lose that job one day which is very possible you’re gonna be way behind so even with a job like that which is it’s not really a great place to work if you’re always doing the same thing but if you do work somewhere like that I’d still suggest learning new stuff on the side just to stay up-to-date with you know whatever language or frameworks or libraries that you’re into and that you work with there’s a lot of jobs like I just explained and it’s understandable because many team leaders they just figure that if it’s if it’s not broke don’t fix it so you’ll see teams using outdated and unsupported technologies just because it seems to be working and why take the time to learn new stuff but if you’re learning new stuff on the side and you can show your team that it’s possible to make your projects faster and more efficient and easier you may be able to sway them into actually updating their technology and just bettering the company overall and the only time I wouldn’t suggest doing that is if you have a really close minded arrogant boss that doesn’t like to get suggestions from people who are you know quote-unquote below him which really sucks to work in an environment like that and I’ll talk more about that in a bit .

Dirty code

So number four is more of a technical habit and that’s writing dirty code and this could be a lot of things you want to write your code in a way that’s visually clean efficient and secure okay those are three very important things when writing code in any language and any framework this is really hard when you’re self-taught because a lot of the times and tutorials and courses you’re not learning the absolute best way to do something because the instructors is trying to make it easy for you to understand the core concept okay so you might have to do some extra research and figure out the best way possible to clean up your code I would definitely suggest always using the dry principle which is don’t repeat yourself so if you see common blocks of code create a class or function to combine that piece of functionality and not just repeating it makes it much cleaner it saves a bunch of lines it’s also easier for other developers to work with you also want to pay attention to performance you want to do things like compress your images minify your JavaScript and CSS you can use a task runner like Gulp and there’s many tools that will allow you to do this stuff automatically in your workflow and even if it’s a small project you can you could even do it manually with something like Minify.org there’s a lot of tools out there also don’t make unnecessary API calls structure your full stack application in a way where you can make as little requests to the server as possible and still get the functionality that you need also testing this is one thing where this is one bad habit that I’m a huge culprit of I don’t do enough testing as much as I know things like unit testing it helps build a more robust app and it saves you on potential future issues I just freaking hate it it’s but it’s probably one of my worst habits and it’s something that I really need to work on to become a better developer sometimes people cut corners to save time but in reality we’re making the application less performant less efficient less readable and it will probably cause more of a headache in the future than if you just took the time to do it the right way to begin with so just try and keep that in mind and these are just some examples of bad practices there’s a lot and it can be kind of tough sometimes to really just you know keep your code clean and performant and efficient not to mention secure .

Bad Work/Life balance

So number five is something that most of us deal with especially if we have families at home and that’s having a bad work-life balance so being a programmer of any kind it takes up loads of time and there’s a lot of reasons for that things are always changing so we’re constantly having to learn more which takes up time we’ve run into issues that can hold us up where we have to do debugging and testing and I’ve actually had periods of time where I would complain to my wife about not getting things done and she’d be completely flabbergasted and say you know you just worked three 10-hour days straight how did you not get anything done and she just doesn’t understand and when you run into issues you’re not being productive you know you’re spending all these hours working physically working but nothing is being added to the project you know you’re not moving any further along so that’s something you have to deal with and for those of you that freelance or if you have your own business and you’re not working for a company that’s paying you you get paid by your clients you know that you can’t just go three days without being productive and not have it severely affect your livelihood so I really empathize with freelancers and people who work for themselves because everything falls on your shoulders you know not to say that you don’t get that same feeling working on a team for a company but I don’t think that it’s as stressful as it is working for yourself so also you want to try to do things that make you happy I’m sure most you guys have hobbies that have nothing to do with coding that you’d like to do but a lot of time work it’s in the way and you want to try to make time for those hobbies you know you don’t want to be on your deathbed and just have memories of writing lines of code you know you want to spend time with your loved ones you want to you know if you play sports or you like to frigging skydive whatever it may be you know you want it you want to make sure you make time for that stuff live a well-balanced life .

Bad office politics

So number six is bad office politics I don’t know if that’s a really good title for what I’m talking about here but basically when you work on a team at a company you work with other people and sometimes conflict can arise you can have disagreements arguments and so on there’s a lot of developers that are really arrogant and always want to be right and even if they know they made a mistake and they’re wrong some would never admit it I’m not saying that’s most developers but I think we’ve all met at least one of these guys and I hear from a lot of people who their team is great and they all get along and that’s awesome that’s how it should be but unfortunately that’s not always the case sometimes you’re going to class with other developers on ideas and solutions and code but try to be diplomatic and respectful but at the same time don’t be a pushover you know especially if you feel strongly about whatever it is you’re proposing and try not to resort to yelling name-calling any of that it’s not gonna get you anywhere if they start doing it just walk away and be the bigger person unfortunately if you have someone on your team that’s just a complete dick and won’t listen to reason there’s really nothing you can do aside from trying to avoid them I mean you could go to your manager but I’d only suggest that if it’s a really you know a major problem in preventing you from getting your work done and that’s just my way of thinking I was brought up to deal with the person that was giving me problems not just go tell on them and I’m not saying that that’s how you should be and that’s my advice that’s just me personally and it’s just something that’s kind of ingrained in me but if they are affecting you where you can’t get your work done where it’s severely impacting your work then it may be necessary to bring it up to a manager or someone higher up alright .

Not learning from mistakes

So number seven is not learning from your mistakes so being a developer you’re gonna make a ton of mistakes it’s just inevitable and there’s nothing wrong with that there is a problem if you keep making the same mistakes over and over and you don’t learn from them so the basic process I would suggest when you make a mistake is to figure out what the greatest cause of the mistake was figure out if there can be a process put in place to prevent it from happening again and then figure out if the mistake had been found sooner could you have prevented the consequences and if you think about these three things when you make a fairly big mistake chances are it won’t happen again or at least you’ll catch it sooner also don’t be too hard on yourself for making mistakes it happens to the best of us I’ve made some pretty bad mistakes in my career but I think the bigger ones I’ve learned from and I haven’t repeated again alright .

Giving up too soon

So number eight is giving up too soon and frustration is a huge part of programming I’ve made a couple of videos on getting frustrated dealing with some of the issues that arise in programming and I’ve seen many people give up too soon in both specific projects and just in general and as programming as a profession due to having so much frustration with it some projects can be really difficult and it seems like once you fix one thing and other thing breaks you know you may think start to think you’re in over your head or you could be doing something else you’re losing money and many other negative thoughts but if you give up too soon and you scrap the project or even worse quit your job then everything that you put into that project or that job was for nothing and I’m not saying that there aren’t projects that shouldn’t be given up on but I’ve seen it many times where the people they’ve given up and from an outsider’s point of view I could tell that if they just stuck with it a little longer it probably would have been successful but they let that frustration really get to them and they just said screw it so before you give up anything just make sure you’ve exhausted all routes you’ve searched up and down asked for help start you know started trying to try something different maybe use a different technology taking a long break and getting your thoughts in order can help sometimes like we talked about in the beginning maybe even putting it aside for a bit if possible you want to just do absolutely everything you can before quitting if you’re stiff you’re still failing then maybe it is time to move on but just make sure all avenues are taken before that happens and because success could be right around the corner and it would be a shame if you just gave up before the last turn .

Being a know it all

Alright number nine is being a know-it-all so I talked a bit about arrogant developers earlier I think what makes many of them arrogant is that they think they know it all and they don’t listen to other developers because why would they already know and have all the answers and being this way sucks for the people that are around you it also hurts yourself because if you think you know it all you’re not actively learning more and bettering yourself and I guarantee that you’re gonna have a horrible wake-up call some when something goes really wrong because you failed to listen to anyone else and or do research I think that if if these types of developers were more open-minded and they welcomed the ideas of others and respected others they would also find themselves happier than just always trying to be right they could be the smartest person on a team but also the worst person on the team because nobody wants to work with them and there’s no good communication going on for a team to be successful there needs to be communication and there needs to be unity and being a know-it-all it just destroys that so if this is you try and you know take the stick out of your ass and be more open-minded and respectful and it will take you a lot further in life .

Can’t take good criticism

So number ten , kind of relates to number nine and this is not being able to take constructive criticism and there’s a big difference between the no adult role type of developer that I was just talking about and someone that’s genuinely trying to help you out and like it’s hard to see the difference sometimes because having something pointed out to you that you did wrong or you could have done better it doesn’t feel good even if the person is completely respectful it still doesn’t feel good and you can make yourself think it’s an it’s an attack on you but a lot of the time it’s not it’s just someone that’s showing you a better way or just sharing an opinion and it took me a while as a content creator to figure that out to figure the difference out of who’s trolling and who’s just trying to help at first I found myself being very defensive to anyone that said anything about how I did something how I wrote my code but then I realized that many of these people are legitimately just trying to help and if they aren’t being disrespectful or they’re not being really nitpicky over something that doesn’t really matter that’s really just preference then I need to take that as something that can really benefit me and benefit my knowledge on whatever it is I think constructive criticism is a fantastic resource for learning and the reason for that is because it’s very targeted towards you in helping you with something that you’re having issues with I think that’s invaluable in fact code reviews and stuff like that they’re great because you get other people’s suggestions and influence on your programming and how you can improve it and better yourself so don’t take things too personal unless you’re actually being attacked or intentionally made fun of and disrespected you know it’s it’s hard to hear that you’re wrong or you could do something better but ultimately it’s gonna make you a better developer okay as long as it was like I said as long as those people aren’t just being asshole trolls .

Alright guys so that’s it that’s my bad habits that you should try to avoid of course is much more than that there’s hundreds of bad habits but these are just some of the ones that I have experience with and that I’ve seen over and over so whether you’re a new developer or someone that’s been doing this for a long time try to avoid falling into these these traps and that’s it thanks for reading if you can follow us on social media I would HIGHLY appreciate that leave a like and I’ll meet you next time thanks guys .

Bad Habits

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The Bad Habits To Avoid As A Developer