Software Engineering: Get the simple things right.

A friend of mine, recently posed the question, to other developers on Twitter: 

Whats the best way to get better at programming?

My answer was: Get the simple things right.

As developers, we're so hyper-focused on what is the latest, greatest, bleeding-edge technology and concepts, that we often don't even notice the plain little basic things that are falling through the cracks in our own work product. We want to refactor our code into the most elegant system possible, or use the flavor-of-the-month design pattern to show everyone else how smart we are; but all of those ideals are truly minor compared to the blaring problems staring us right in the face, because we don't know or we don't pay attention to the mundane, ordinary details of how we're doing our job.

Follow syntax standards, for the benefit of the rest of us.

You might think you're the Lone-Ranger, but we're not your Tonto. I was recently working with a fellow developer who is definitely a smart guy, who I respect, but running his code was such a chore. The reason? Warnings and notices; he had configured his environment to ignore them, and me being a good little boy configured my environment to blow up on them. While I, and most everyone else, are setting ourselves up to write perfect syntax, he's trailblazing what will un-doubtably be the new standard once everyone has to turn off warnings. No, Kemo Sabe, syntax matters. What's the point of developing this amazing new library, if no other developers want to touch it because they can't run it on their dev machines without blowing up? All you have to do is NOT turn warnings off in your environment, and write the syntax the way it was meant to be written. It's a simple thing that requires slightly more effort to conform to the language standards.

Ask for advice

Lets be honest, most of us are closet-egomaniacs. We want to be the smartest guy/girl in the room, but even in your head you're denying this and tweeting a scathing retort to @jessegreathouse because I've outed you and your bruised ego -- but a very simple thing that we can do, as developers, to immediately get better, with absolutely no effort (aside from conquering our own ego), is ask other programmers to review our work. All it takes is for you to read or hear the input of your peers, and you immediately start to grow as a developer. Even if your peers are wrong, you're going through the motions of discovering the reasons why they're wrong. It's that process that makes you better; that discourse is where the growth happens.

So many simple things, not enough blog space

Theres probably hundreds of simple things, that we already know, that we can get right, to immediately make our work product better. If you can think of any, please comment and let me know what you think. I'm anxious to hear about it. Make it your new mission to get the simple things right, and see how much better you can be with very little effort. Good luck!