Best Coding Habits to Adopt Now (that I wish I did earlier)

[00:00] When you teach yourself a new skill, we all have a tendency to pick up bad habits. wrong, those bad habits tend to stick. reaching a ceiling in your abilities and you won't be able to regress

[00:14] For example, I have been using a computer with a keyboard since I Over time my fingers have learnt where the keys are, so I don't need to look

[00:26] Because I didn't start with the correct technique I'm now stuck in the 60 to 80 words per minute range, and the only The same is true for coding, and in this video I'm gonna be covering

[00:42] yourself in your career later on. I've seen this time and time again from both junior and even senior developers. When given a problem, their first instinct is to open up VS Code

[00:56] I get it, we became software developers because we like However, it's very rare that we fully understand a problem It's important to look at the problem properly first and make sure you

[01:10] It might be that the problem is really just a symptom of another issue. It is much better to ask yourself why the problem exists first, so you can solve Once you understand the problem, then plan out your solution using

[01:27] Think about how your application is going to need to change in the future so you Every time a developer jumps straight into coding, there's often a lot of

[01:40] Number two is to make code templates. outside, but it's actually quite boring. single application that you build.

[01:53] well as all the infrastructure. I've lost count of the number of APIs or Lambda functions I've built over time. the application pretty much looked the same in each case.

[02:06] You can save yourself a lot of time and be a more efficient developer if you build In an ideal world, you will type in the name of your api, select the ahead and build out everything that you need so you can just focus on the

[02:22] But at the very least, you should be using templates so that you don't have to write Number three is don't reinvent the wheel. You can also use the work of others when building out your application.

[02:37] probably solved it before you. your application to save you from having to write the code yourself. I see a lot of developers waste time trying to reinvent the wheel because

[02:50] And use an existing library. There are some things like password hashing that you should Number four is to explain it to a friend or colleague.

[03:05] We all get stuck from time to time. The difference is that senior developers know when to ask for help rather than In most cases, the person you ask won't know the answer, but if you

[03:20] come up with a solution yourself. She isn't a developer, she hasn't got a clue what I'm But to be able to explain something to someone else, I need to think about

[03:33] So next time you're stuck, ask someone for 15 minutes of their time so you If you're lucky, they might know the answer, but chances are Lastly, it's important to keep a developer journal.

[03:48] You might think that when you have a problem, you'll remember how to do it next time, but chances are it's gonna be in six months time, and all you'll remember By keeping a journal of everything you're learning, you can go back and

[04:03] You don't need to write down masses and masses of detail of what you're doing. solved it, that's usually enough to remind yourself how you did something.

[04:15] I usually keep a notebook on my desk so I can just jot down The downside of this is you're gonna fill up a lot of notebooks over your The other option is to use applications such as Notion or

[04:29] And this is really useful because you can search through them as well. do that and you need to watch this video on how I take and organize my notes. Make sure you hit like and subscribe and I'll see you in the next video.