On this, my first blog post, I want to begin this blogging journey starting from the most basic skill we all must have to be good developers, YES, you read it right, the one and only.
Let me quickly walk you through what means to be an effective developer daily; well, as crazy as it might sound you simply need to write code. However, there are some gotchas to that easy and simple task. After all, we always have heard that being a good developer is not an easy task.
As we go through our software development journey we tend to focus on following the best practices, what is the most up-to-date ide, tool, programming language, etc. Despite all of these matters being important they are not even remotely as crucial as writing good code.
Do not lose patience while you read we are coming to the point, you may be wondering, what the heck is to write good code? I am with you. This is why you came to this specific post.
Imagine, all of a sudden, you are not allowed to speak anymore, how will you communicate your ideas? how will you make sure you are transmitting your intention effectively? My best guess would be to write what you are trying to say. The more you do it the better you will become at it, and the more proficient. As far as you can think to write code is not too distant from not being able to speak and needing to still be capable of communicating with the world.
When we write code we need the code to be capable of speaking on our behalf, I could write an entire book on this topic but I will try to keep it simple and concise for the sake of not discouraging you.
First of all, have in mind that although code is meant to be executed by machines, it is read by humans, yes, another developer just like you and me at some point will have to understand what is the logic behind the functions, variables, statements and classes you, back in the day wrote. Not to mention that other developers could very well simply be yourself in the future 😇.
Additionally, exercising your writing skills will force you to think about the reader, you will need to empathize, and be on your reader's shoes. Would you engage with an article without a clear topic? or addressing too many subjects at the same time? Well, think about these and relate them to writing code. It should be easy to understand at the same time that is concise.
Last but certainly not least, what tools do we have at our disposal, of easy access, to write, just to dump our ideas into a piece of written thing that we can share, that sounds like a blog post, doesn't it? You're right, here I am, writing not code but something to improve my writing and communication skills which, at the end of the day, will widely impact the quality of my day-to-day code.
Be a better coder, start your writing journey today!