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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber Community Curator

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What are your worst coding habits?

Is it bad commit messages, getting distracted by social media, commenting out tests?

Let’s hear it all.

Top comments (163)

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selbekk profile image
selbekk •

I write git status at least 4000 times a day, for no reason whatsoever.

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learnbyexample profile image
Sundeep •

how about ls and clear

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huyduy profile image
Huy Duy •

You can use Ctrl + L instead.

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titivermeesch profile image
PlayBossWar •

Doing this all day long when I'm working for no reason, I don't know why actually

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jcoelho profile image
José Coelho •

Yep that's me. I even write git status after committing just to make sure 😅

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glyphcat profile image
GlyphCat •

And also git branch after git checkout just to make sure I'm on the right branch… 😂

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kaddkaka profile image
kaddkaka •

My prompt reflects which branch I'm on, super helpful!

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learnbyexample profile image
Sundeep •

That has actually helped me once, I'd forgotten to git add some files

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glaaki profile image
Sean Porter •

at least alias it to gst!

also: me too

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cjbrooks12 profile image
Casey Brooks •

With as much as I check git status, I don't have time for a 3-letter alias! gs is all I can afford 😜

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a0s profile image
Anton Osenenko •

And gpr for git pull --rebase

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Mahesh Sunuwar •

Most of the time, git log follows git status in my case. :P

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kaddkaka profile image
kaddkaka •

tig gives me more information, more concisely. Try it out :)

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kiro112 profile image
Jairo Malanay •

Is it bad ?
Im also guilty of this one + ls and clear

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khoahuynhdev profile image
Khoa Huỳnh •

Underrated

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes •

This sounds like a good practice😂

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haqqer profile image
ahmad_haqqer •

me too dude

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bhupesh profile image
Bhupesh Varshney 👾 •

Been there
😂😭

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alanmbarr profile image
Alan Barr •

Never taking the time to learn hotkeys. Not reaching out to a second set of eyes before spending too much time on something. Not doing enough design up front.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Are you me?

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glaaki profile image
Sean Porter •

I use vim for basically everything & I can't remember how to do macros without looking it up. I think just generalize this to "not learning your tools effectively" & I totally agree.

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Jonathan Speek •

This is super relatable.

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alexantra profile image
Alex Antra •

I rewrite other people’s code to my extremely high standard so I can understand it. Such a time waste.

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noreading profile image
Dominik •

I know this far too well. There is this strong feeling of „You can’t leave it like it is, when you know it.“ but in the end ... it would most likely run for ages without any issues if we wouldn’t rewrite it. And maybe nobody would ever touch it again. :-)

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

I’m sure this thread will contain much worse habits than that! 😂

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helenanders26 profile image
Helen Anderson •

Haha! you are far more patient than I am!

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hugoliconv profile image
Hugo • • Edited

I do not write unit tests 😔

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otr500miles2go profile image
DIANE GAYDEN •

I knew if I kept reading I'd find my bad habit.

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Jacque Schrag •

Same! I've never written a test. I know that I should, but... ¯_(ツ)_/¯

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Christopher Kade •

Small plug, but I wrote an introduction to unit testing if that could help any of you 😃

dev.to/christopherkade/introductio...

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jnschrag profile image
Jacque Schrag •

This is great, thank you!

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mandaputtra profile image
Manda Putra •

Dateline !== No test, or just lrave like this

Agile !== No test

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yashints profile image
Yaser Adel Mehraban •

Not reading enough docs, whether it's a framework or API

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reddyaravind178 profile image
aravind_reddy •

Totally relatable

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highcenburg profile image
Vicente G. Reyes •

Stare at my editor -> search for help in duckduckgo -> open social media -> change music on spotify😂

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bhupesh profile image
Bhupesh Varshney 👾 •

That's literally me every single day 😂😂

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crongm profile image
Carlos Garcia ★ •

Same. ❤

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helenanders26 profile image
Helen Anderson •

Being too lazy to turn off 'helpful' system settings, like the one that autocompletes a closing bracket. I used to end up adding a closing bracket myself and then having too many so had to hit backspace to get rid of one.

Now that that has become muscle memory, whenever I'm not using that tool I hit backspace on autopilot even though there is no 'helpful' closing bracket to get rid of.

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Ben Sinclair •

I do this all the time!
It's all muscle memory now.

The other way the IDE gets in my way is when I want to add a closing bracket or parenthesis but my cursor is already immediately before one and the editor treats it as if they're the same - so I think I've added enough, but oh no.

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helenanders26 profile image
Helen Anderson •

Ugh. Instant rage quit.

There are also some strange moments when the cursor just vanishes completely and I don't know where I am anymore.

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ben profile image
Ben Halpern •

Ah yes, been there.

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flexdinesh profile image
Dinesh Pandiyan •

Step 1: Spot a code smell
Step 2: Add a // TODO comment
Step 3: Never get back to it

Repeat.

This is the story of my dev life 😔

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Forest Hoffman •

If you're a VS Code user, checkout the Todo Tree extension.

It's a nice alternative to searching in all files for // TODO or // DEBUG before commiting!

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John Dev •

Good tip 😉

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briankephart profile image
Brian Kephart •

Not using feature branches.

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Ben Halpern •

This was me until I worked with folks who set great examples. I eventually learned better habits.

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glaaki profile image
Sean Porter •

Not sure I'd agree with this one, depends on what you're trying to accomplish.

Committing directly to trunk has its benefits, everyone gets the changes immediately but you just need to make sure that the changes are self-contained enough to not break anything.

I used to think this was the way to go too until I read Continuous Delivery
all the way through.

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kayis profile image
K •

Trunk based devlopment ftw.

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stearm profile image
Stefano Armenes •

You should try git flow :)

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htphuongse profile image
Phuong Huynh •

haha, you should try to fix it soon

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Donna Hogan •
  • git push --force on a regular basis
  • using VSC to open dot files and not taking the time to learn vim or nano, etc
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selbekk profile image
selbekk • • Edited

My git alias for that command is git fush 😄

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Robert Schaap •

I need that in my life. I'm an obsessive compulsive interactive rebaser.

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Ben Halpern •

I don’t think the second is a bad habit. There’s no special reason one needs to be using bin or nano imo.

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Eric Curtin •

I think all Unix/Linux developers should know vim. Because vi or vim is almost always installed on these variants. Sure for local development a UI is great, a very useful tool! But for editing files on remote machines, the ability to ssh to a remote machine and make a quick change is very important.