Six things you can do to become a better developer

Whether you’re new to software engineering, or you’ve been doing it for years, we can all strive to be better. Here are some things (that I still do) which helped me to get to where I am now.

Sadly I don’t know kung-fu. Image credit: Markus-Spiske on Wunderstock (license)

Review your teammate's code

I’ve heard so many junior engineers shy away from code reviews because they “don’t know enough”. You’re actually the perfect person to review my code. Good code is simple code. Good code doesn’t need you to have been programming for years before you can understand it. If you don’t understand my code, I need to know!

Code review is the perfect opportunity to learn from other engineers. You can ask questions around the code; “Why did you do it that way?”, “how does this work?” etc. Most engineers will enjoy explaining it to you.

Challenge yourself to make at least one comment on every single code review you look at. If you understand everything and think that it’s great, let that be your comment! We all need more positive feedback on code reviews (even senior engineers feel impostor syndrome). I started doing this four or five years ago and it helped me to grow massively.

Take your time going through the code. Make sure you’re engaging with it and you understand how it fits together. Think about how you might have gone about it instead and then think about the pros and cons to each approach. This could be a really great conversation between you and the author of the work which could benefit both of you. I know I’ve had occasions where my junior engineers provided a better solution than what I had.

Find yourself a mentor

I wrote an article on mentorship in a general context, but my experience is in mentoring software engineers.

A mentor should have a regular catch up with you where you can talk about:

• what you’re working on
• challenges you’re facing
• things that you’ve done that you’re proud of
• what you’re learning about
• where you want to be in a month / year / 5 years

They don’t have to be an expert in any of this stuff. One of the people I’m currently mentoring is…