Habits I Learned Too Late as a Developer — Part 1

For a long time, I believed that writing more code would automatically make me a better developer.
It didn’t.

I was improving my syntax and learning new frameworks, but I was mostly doing it in isolation.
What I missed for years was the ecosystem around software development,the people, the discussions and the shared knowledge.

These are some of the habits I learned much later than I should have.

1️⃣ Not following high-quality open-source projects

I used GitHub mainly as a place to store my own code.
I wasn’t actively following well-maintained, widely used open-source projects.

That meant I missed:

How real-world projects are structured

How maintainers review pull requests

How design decisions are discussed in issues

What “production-quality” code actually looks like

Reading good code consistently turned out to be just as important as writing my own.

What I do now

Even when I’m not actively coding, I visit GitHub weekly and check my starred repositories.
I follow a small number of projects and occasionally read a single file, commit instead of trying to understand the entire codebase.

This habit alone changed how I think about code quality.

2️⃣ Not knowing developer communities like Medium, dev.to, or CodePen

For a long time, learning meant courses, tutorials and bootcamps only.
I underestimated community-driven platforms.

What I later realized:

Courses teach ideal scenarios and sooner or later, you forget most of them

Community posts show real-world mistakes and trade-offs

Small experiments often teach more than full tutorials

Platforms like dev.to and CodePen expose you to problems people are actively solving, not just concepts explained in isolation.

Following challenges and community experiments is also fun.
And that matters more than I used to think.

If I want to become a better developer, I need to enjoy the learning process, not just endure it.