5 practices to improve your Programming skills

5 Practices to Improve Your Programming Skills

Laptop on a desk

Photo by Maxwell Nelson on Unsplash

A programmer is a person who does the design and development of software systems. There are various sorts of programming careers: frontend development, backend development, full-stack development, embedded systems development, etc. Programmers usually work with different programming languages and markup languages. The expertise of each programmer depends on their skill sets. Therefore, they always try to enhance their skill sets by doing various activities. There are indeed unique ways to enhance a programmer’s skill set based on each field. For example, practicing to handle CSS better is great if you are doing frontend development. However, these different programming careers have a generic process known as the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).

Therefore, there are indeed general practices for all types of programmers to improve their skill sets. I selected the full-stack software development career about four years ago. Like any other die-hard programmer, I did many different activities to enhance my programming skillset. Some habits helped me to become better at programming with additional perks as well.

The following habits helped me improve my programming skills. These practices helped me to perform better in my software engineering career. As mentioned above, these are general practices for all programmers.

Write Clean, Readable, and High-Quality Code

As programmers, we usually write code most of the time. Programmers often add, remove, or modify code lines in their project’s codebases. Those source code modifications either improve or worsen the codebase. We always need to improve our codebases with high-quality, bug-free code. Following a well-defined coding style guide is undoubtedly mandatory. If your project still doesn’t have a coding style guide, you can always suggest a well-accepted one.

Software development is a collaborative activity. Many programmers often work with the same piece of code collaboratively. Some programmers can apply patches quickly for complex source codes that were written by someone else. On the other hand, some programmers struggle with complex source code. Therefore, you always need to write self-explanatory code even if you are implementing an absolutely complex logic. The correct design patterns, directory structures, module decompositions help us to write clean code. For example, see how the Chromium team organized the browser’s UI controllers to reduce the complexity.

Well-organized UI elements in Chromium source. A screenshot by the author.

Follow the Performance-First Way

Programmers have to write better code to impress hardware and other programmers (by writing clean code). We have to write code that will perform well in time and space factors to impress hardware. There are indeed several approaches to solve the same software engineering problem. The performance-first way motivates you to select the most practical and well-performing solution. Performance is still crucial regardless of modern hardware because accumulated minor performance issues may affect badly for the whole software system in the future.

Implementing hardware-friendly solutions requires computer science fundamentals knowledge. The reason is that computer science fundamentals teach us about how to use the right data structures and algorithms. Choosing the right data structures and algorithms is the key to success behind every complex software engineering project. Some performance problems could stay hidden in the codebase. Besides, your performance test suite may not cover those scenarios. Your goal should be to apply performance patches when you spot such a problem always.

For example, I found the following performance patch from Git’s source code on GitHub.

A performance patch from Git’s source code. A screenshot by the author.

Master Your Project’s Domain

Programmers usually work with various sorts of software projects. Each software project may belong to different domains such as healthcare, ecommerce, cloud computing, education, and business processes. There is always a limitation to your skill enhancement process if you are limited to one software project. In other words, if you know every bit and piece of your project after working for several years, your daily development routine will become a piece of cake unless you are not working with new things.

Mastering the project’s domain opens doors to new learning opportunities. Someone could argue saying that domain knowledge is needed only for business analysts — not for developers. But, it is not possible to do programming properly if we see the whole software system’s process as an abstract system. If we understand both technical architecture and domain, the entire software development process becomes crystal clear.

Programmers can come up with complete solutions when they become more familiar with the project’s domain. This literally means that no one will solve something better without studying its domain.

Dive Deeper Into the Project’s Architecture

There are many software architecture patterns. Layered, client-server, plug-in, and pub/sub architecture are common software design patterns used nowadays. Software architects often decompose the entire project into subprojects to reduce complexity and to achieve higher maintainability factors. In most scenarios, programmers don’t need to understand every bit and piece of the software project’s architecture to contribute to the project. However, programmers have to understand the software system’s architecture better to add significant contributions. Also, a typical programmer’s career growth goes toward software architect roles.

Moreover, software systems usually need to have frequent architectural upgrades and improvements based on new requirements. For example, when your Software as a service (SAAS) product gets new users from different countries, you will have to integrate Content delivery networks (CDNs). Knowing the existing architecture better will help you to suggest significant architectural enhancements to the project.

It’s great to study the project’s architecture to a level where you can explain high-level architecture to someone. For example, check out the following explanation of Netflix’s architecture:

A Design Analysis of Cloud-based Microservices Architecture at Netflix

1. Introduction

medium.com

Become a Learner and Also a Teacher

In every field, the learning process never ends. Similarly, there is always something new to learn every day in the programming field. Many computer science-related theories, articles, research papers, and implementations are published every day. The computer science field is still growing like any other field in the world. Therefore, every day, you will find something that will enhance your skillset. For example, you may learn a new design pattern today to enhance the readability of the code you wrote yesterday.

Also, teaching is a great way to remember what you have learned so far. You don’t need to explain everything about a particular solution to a compiler — because it has only interest in your code’s syntax. But, you have to explain almost everything if you are explaining a particular solution to a person. Therefore, becoming a teacher to someone is a great way to learn something in-depth.

I usually post my new findings, learnings, and experiments about programming.

Conclusion

Performance-first programming is underrated in the modern world due to powerful computers. But computation power is still limited. Hence, programmers always need to come up with efficient solutions.

Continuous learning is the most important practice to become an expert in the programming field. Albert Einstein once said,

“Once you stop learning you start dying.”