3 Tips to improve your coding skills

Table of content :

• Understand your environnement
• Small bites
• Move it around, refine

1. Understand your environnement

Developing your curiosity is crucial for becoming a successful developer. Always ask yourself questions and experiment with your code to enhance your understanding of it. Try removing certain parts, comment them out, and observe how the program behaves. It's crucial to understand the purpose of the code you're writing, as well as the structure of your project. This knowledge will help you create high-quality software that is efficient and easy to maintain.

To create efficient, maintainable, and scalable code, you must always be critical of your work and strive to improve it. This includes evaluating your coding practices and learning from your mistakes. A curious and analytical mindset will help you to develop your skills and stay ahead in your field. Moreover, it will enable you to write code that is more precise, effective, and easy to maintain.

Never stop exploring and experimenting with your code. Keep striving to improve your skills. By doing so, you'll become a more competent and confident developer.

2. Small bites

One good practice to develop is to work on the smallest feature possible. This approach allows you to focus on one manageable piece of code at a time. And once your done, you can review it and write a well-named commit. By breaking down the work into smaller chunks, you can improve the quality of your code and gain a better understanding of your craft. Moreover, it can help reduce the amount of stress that coding can provide.

Working on small but manageable pieces of code enables you to be more efficient and productive. And it allows for better collaboration with other team members. Furthermore, when you encounter a bug, it's easier to identify the root cause when the code is well organised into smaller components. Always aim to break down your work into smaller features and iterate on them until they are complete, tested, and well-named. This way, you can create high-quality code that is easy to maintain and scale in the future.

3. Move it around, refine

Refactoring is a critical practice for developers, and it should get done regularly and proactively. Always keep in mind the next person who will read your code and try to make it more readable and understandable. Consider renaming your variables, functions, folders, and files to be more descriptive and consistent with one another.

By taking the time to improve the readability of your code, you'll gain a better understanding of your codebase, and it will be easier to maintain and scale in the future. Refactoring can be a daunting task, but by following Rule 2 (i.e., breaking down the work into manageable pieces), you can make it a stress-free and enjoyable process.

Don't wait until your code is riddled with technical debt before you start refactoring. Instead, make it a regular part of your development process, and you'll find that your code will be more efficient, maintainable, and scalable over time. So, keep your codebase clean and consistent, and you'll be setting yourself up for success in the long run.