Practical Developer Wisdom You Cannot Google Easily

#career #programming #devlife #softwareengineering

Most developer advice sounds helpful until you actually try to use it.

Google can tell you how to use a framework, optimize a query, or fix an error message. What it cannot tell you is how software survives real teams, real deadlines, and real people.

This is the kind of stuff I only learned by messing things up repeatedly.

Here is the developer wisdom I wish someone had told me earlier.

Clean code matters less than understandable code

Early in my career, I chased elegance. Short functions. Clever abstractions. Beautiful patterns.

Then someone else had to maintain my code.

What I learned is that most bugs are not caused by messy code. They are caused by code that is too smart for its own good. The best code is not the cleanest. It is the one a tired developer can understand at 3 a.m. without context.

If a junior developer cannot follow it without a walkthrough, it is probably too complex.

Most bugs come from assumptions, not syntax

When something breaks in production, it is rarely because you forgot a semicolon or misused an API.

It is usually because you assumed:

This value will never be null
This function will always return fast
This endpoint will not be called that way
This data will stay small

The more confident you are about an assumption, the more dangerous it is. Defensive coding is not paranoia. It is respect for reality.

Code reviews are about people, not just code

I used to think code reviews were about catching mistakes.

They are not.

Good code reviews are about:

Sharing context
Teaching patterns
Aligning mental models
Preventing knowledge silos

If a review only says “looks good” or nitpicks formatting, it failed. If it helps someone understand why a decision was made, it succeeded.

Productivity is about energy, not hours

There was a time when I believed the best developers just worked longer.

That belief burned me out.

What actually matters is:

Focus
Recovery
Mental clarity

Two hours of deep work beats eight hours of distracted effort. If your output keeps dropping, the solution is usually rest, not discipline.

Shipping something imperfect beats polishing nothing

Perfection feels productive. It is often just fear wearing a nicer outfit.

I have seen countless features delayed because they were not “ready yet.” Most of them never shipped. The ones that did ship imperfectly got real feedback and improved fast.

Users forgive rough edges. They do not forgive silence.