Make development great again ✌🏻

I always worked in startup environment as a developer and I noticed that sometimes developers are in a particular bad mood.

- Do you think your job meet your expectations?- Do you feel good on what you are doing now?- Do you like business decisions taken over the time?

No, I don’t like Trump 👱🏻

I believe this mood can be harmful both to you and to the company you work for.

I’ve wondered if there is something in particular that can help people to avoid these feelings, so I want to share with the community some tips based on my personal experience that help me a lot every day. I hope they can help.

It will not take a lot, I promise 🙂Please feel free to give me your feedbacks 👍🏻

Business is important like coding

I know it may not be easy for developers to understand, but this is the first lesson that we should learn when we want make software in general.

Making good relationship with business team is crucial for the good living.Discussing a lot with them and organising a lot of meetings to create perfect and stable requirements is the key for future success of your company.You can learn from them too.

Try to document everything you can (code, feature behaviour, architecture, etc…) Otherwise, this is what can happen…

“When I did not understand anything in the specifications”

Create a good team environment

The people you are working with is your strength.

Believe me, the more the team you are working with is strong, the more it will be easy for you being in a good mood.

Creating a CI (Continuous Improvement) lifecycle is a good way to strengthen your team.Organise technical biweekly meetings where everyone actively and positively participates, discuss software improvements, propose new technologies or talk about what’s going wrong in the project.

Building the right team culture is not simple, but this will be the result.

“Senior developers programming as a team”

But we are developers, let’s talk about software…

Build now for the future is the main goal that a developer should have in mind.If the code that you are writing is only for today, probably you’ll feel bad the next time you’ll touch it again.The previous points of the article are strictly correlated with how we build software and this is the reason:

Discuss a solution with your team based on business requirements avoids the risk to write bad code (therefore, bad mood).

Perfect, but how can we write good code and take good decisions ?

You’ve got the point!There is no way to build the perfect software but the mission should be to make it always better along the time.

Create and follow standards in your codebase, use the right patterns to solve your problems, don’t use boilerplates or starter packs (yes, you should know how your software is built and how it works).Write simple and readable code and learn new things every day.Because remember:

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute — Harold Abelson

Don’t be afraid if someone else changed your code or gave you negative feedback, be always positive and ready to improve it.

Conclusions

Being in a good mood for a developer is not about code, but about environment.We are human too and the secret to be happy is to have a good relationship with others.That’s why at this point, for me, the title should change from “Make development great again” to “Make development fun again”.

Thanks for reading ❤️