Improving Coding Skills - Building Better Developers by Building Better Habits

Welcome to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nor podcast, where we work on getting better step by step, professionally and personally. Let's get started. Well hello and welcome back. We are continuing our season where we are building better habits. But you may say, that's not what I saw. That's right. You saw Building Better Developers, Develop-a-Nor. That's what we are. It's a podcast, a website, videos, all that kind of goodness because we are working towards building better developers this season. How do we take these developers that we're talking to, yes that means you, and build habits? How do we walk through habits? How have we done it? How do we recommend other people do it? And as a community, how do we work to make ourselves better? With each of these episodes, there is going to be homework. There's going to be an action item at the end. There's going to be a, we'll call it a challenge if that helps. If it helps us gamify it, then so be it. That's what we're looking for. And before we get into it, my name is Rob Brodhead. I am one of the founders of Develop-a-Nor, Building Better Developers. Also a founder of RB Consulting, where we really focus on helping companies use technology better. A lot of time, if your company is in a situation where they're like, what do I really have and how much do we use it? That's a perfect time for us to step in and say, let us help you with that. Let's look at what is it that you have? What is the technology that you have? What is the sprawl maybe that you have of all these applications and all these users and all these different things they use? And how do we find ways to clean that stuff up through integration, simplification, automation, find ways to make you leverage that better, help you leverage that better, and also cut out the crap that you don't need. Remove the duplicate kinds of applications and features and functions and things like Streamline stuff so that you go from being like that big, ugly Homer Simpson car that's got everything in the world on it to like an F1 racer that is stripped down to doing the thing that it does best. Good things and bad things. As a good thing, I have gone through this week and have dived into one of these kinds of projects. The good thing was it took a while because it's a big company. It seems small, but if you're a developer, you know. I finally got access to code repository so I can actually look at code. I finally got, I was able to see a bunch of different stuff, but I finally now have the permission so I can actually go look at the code and instead of guessing my way into stuff and saying, do you do this? Did you ever think of that? Do you try this? How is this set up? I can actually go look at it and say, hey, you did that great or hey, why don't you take a look at it and do it better. Bad thing. As a bad thing, gosh, now I don't have, I had a whole lot of bad stuff the last time I was thinking about it and this time I'm trying to think of bad things. A bad thing is it is getting towards the end of the month in the fall times that we have here and the back and forth of the weather can make it very difficult for those of us that have allergies and sinuses and things like that. And so my bad thing, which is sort of combined with good, yesterday I think I went through an entire box of Kleenex because I was just blowing my nose, blowing my nose, blowing my nose, blowing my nose. So the good thing is I had extra boxes of Kleenex. The bad thing is I had to utilize an entire box, I'm pretty sure, yesterday. Someone who actually is very simpatico with that whole thing on the other side is going to introduce himself. Michael, go for it. Hey everyone. My name is Michael Milosz. I'm one of the co-founders of DeveloperNerve, Building Better Developers. I'm also the founder of Envision QA. If you are a business clinician, small independent business, looking for help with your software, it's either custom software, it's not working, you need help supporting it, we're your go-to company. If you have multiple tools that you're paying for that don't just quite cut it, we will also help you by building or assessing what you have, identifying areas of improvement, and we can help kind of guide you on the path to getting the right tools for what you need, be it custom or purchased. Good thing, bad thing. Good thing, we're finally getting rain. It has been weeks since we've had rain here and oh my God, it is like a dust bowl. So good thing, bad thing because of the dust bowl, like Rob said, my allergies have been hell this month. I'm actually, I don't know if I want to wish for winter yet because I don't like the cold, but hey, at least my allergies will get better at some point. So this episode, first, in a prior episode, I just want to poke you a little bit. If you weren't doing a couple episodes back, if you haven't tried the seven days of pomodoros, one pomodoro a day, I highly recommend it. It worked out very well for me. There's a lot of cool stuff I learned while doing that. Also, if you have not looked at an automation, if you've not spent some time trying to figure out where you can automate your life and make some improvements, I highly recommend that you take a look at that and do that because, and do it repeatedly. Do it for a week, do it for the next week, do it for the next week because you will find that your life will get much easier as you dive into four, five, six, seven, a dozen new automations that you've built for those things that you used to do and it leads to drive you nuts. In this episode, we're going to look at coding skills. Now you're probably saying, this is building better developers, even if it is habits this season, it's building better developers. I'm a developer, I know how to code. I code every day. Yes, you do, but you don't learn new ways to code every day. You don't necessarily look at what's out there. What are some new best practices? What are some new versions? What are some of the things that now that you're in version two of your environment as opposed to version one, now that version two is available, there may be some improvements that allow you to take things you used to do in version one and do them better in version two. Now it could be that they still work, which is very often the case. Java, I'm looking at you. Stuff works forever. It's like, it can be deprecated for version after version after version. So the stuff you used to do still works, but it is not the best or the most efficient way to do it. It also may not be the best standard or practice that's being used right now. So what I want to talk about is how do we find ways to poke ourselves to become better at developing as a developer on a regular basis? Now of course, daily habits are a great way to do it. So one of the things we can do is we can go out and we can look at, one of the things we can do is we can read blogs or listen to podcasts or things like that and sort of keep an ear out for where is there something new? One of the things we used to do in our mentor classes way back is it was, especially when we met every week, one of the things is we had a nugget. Everybody basically would, not every time, but the idea was everybody would contribute a nugget. Some thing that they ran into that week, a new site, a new tool, a new way to use a tool, those kinds of things. If you had listened, if you were following through those, you would have gotten some of that. There are a lot of podcasts out there that are in that sense where they have regular tools that they will recommend. They have these things that they bring up. They have topics that they cover that will, at least if they don't go into it, give you ideas of what are some things I should be looking at? What are some things that I'm like, oh, I don't know that I know that that well. Maybe I should spend some time on it. So it could be reading a blog article. It could be listening to a specific podcast or listening to a podcast. It could be going out to the vendor site for whatever that tool is or those tools are that you use and just keep an eye out for news going on. Listening hang out in forums and discussions and community groups, user groups even that are related to those technologies. One of the things I want to throw out there that I stumbled across is a place called codesignal.com. C-O-D-E-S-I-G-N-A-L dot com. I actually was introduced to it because they have a pretty cool technology interviewing vetting type of service they provide where it's basically it is a web-based development environment. They give you programming environment actually is that they give you a programming problem and then you have an interpreter there. Basically you have a place which you can write your code and you have a button so you can run your code and see the output. It is its own little self-contained IDE environment. It also has a lot of different programming languages that it supports as part of that. If you're coming in and doing a C-sharp interview, the interviewer can go out there and say, hey, take a look at this. They can assign you, give you like one week to get this done. You go out, you fill out the problem, you solve it, you promote it out to them or whatever. You publish it out to them. Great. The other thing this site does is that they have a way as a developer that you can learn technology. They have tutorial classes that utilize the same IDE and will walk you through a wide variety of topics. Now the nice thing about something like this, and this is along the same lines in a sense of like your Udemy's and your LinkedIn education and some of those kinds of places that are is that if you have one of these subscriptions or if you're utilizing one of these tutorial training sites, you can go out and a lot of times very regularly for a low cost or maybe even free, look at classes, take a class of some sort. You don't have to do it all in a day. You can take this and you can do it piecemeal where you're just like, I'm going to take a class on X, whatever that is. For example, I was like, you know what? I want to spend a little more time playing around with machine learning and data analytics. So I found a little series that was talking about machine learning and data analytics and using Python and some things like that. I'm like, oh, this is a fun little thing. I'm going to play around with this for a while. It's just sort of see what I know and better yet, what don't I know? Where are there gaps? What are the things that I can go in? And since I'm doing it in a formal setting, there may be things that now I'm going to I never had to deal with because I was never asked that question. So I didn't have to go research it. Something like that is a great way to spend 15 minutes a day or even five or 10 minutes a day doing this thing, especially if it's directed like a tutorial or training or something about online training, those kinds of things, because it helps you keep some of those skills maybe fresh and also can teach you some new stuff along the way. It will help you be a better developer because now you're not just relying on your developer skills from yesterday. It is literally you going into each day saying, I'm going to learn something new. Now, you can do this in a lot of areas, but I think the ones that are the most danger to us are things like this where we do it every day. And so it is easy for us to fall into the trap to say that I'm learning something new every day because I do this every day. There is a reason people refer to a developer that has one year of experience 10 times being different from a developer that has 10 years of experience. We all know that there is a way for us to get into a rut where we're solving the same problems the same way, using the same tools day in and day out. And we could almost flash back to a prior episode, automate the stuff that we did. So those are a couple of key areas that I want to just touch on. But now I'm going to let Michael sort of give me your feedback and then maybe some of the areas that you want to talk about and how do you become a better developer looking specifically at those developer skills? So I'll start out with kind of some of the coding standards and best practices. So one of the things as developers, like Rob said, we could get into that rut of doing the same thing again and again and again over time. What I like to do, especially flashback a couple of episodes ago, is do a kitchen sink app. And what I do with that is the kitchen sink app isn't just for the actual application, the functionality of the application. I actually use the kitchen sink apps for multiple purposes. Yes, it is to help give me a code template. Kind of here's how I did something. Here's best practice. But what I also like using the kitchen sink apps for are things like Rob mentioned are using IDEs. So one of the biggest things as a developer that I've seen over the years again and again is especially developers coming out of college. They're taught one particular framework or one particular tool like IntelliJ, visual code or just text editors and compilers. When they get into the business world, they again learn whatever that business is using. The problem is the next company you go work for may not use those tools. So you need to constantly learn what else is out there, you know, diverse your skills, so to speak, in multiple platforms, not just necessarily languages, but the tools that you use. So if you use Eclipse, maybe check out IntelliJ, load that kitchen sink app, see if you can get to work, see where all the debuggers are, all the compilers. How do you configure it? Load it again into like visual code or some different IDEs. Play around with that. So if you actually did the challenge for the kitchen sink app, you've already got this tool. So now just start going out and just, you know, this is an idea. You can go play with different IDEs. The other thing that is challenging and like Rob mentioned, you know, Java is a great example of this. You know, Java 8 for a lot of people is still the only version of Java that's out there. And that's all they know. That's all they've been doing for what? Almost 20 years now. The thing is that we're now in Java 22. Java changed their release program. So now there's new versions of the language coming out every six months, every other year. And there are new changes, more enhancements, more security features coming out with every iteration. It behooves you to keep track of where it is that the language that you're using is going. Not just best practices, but what are the new tools and libraries being introduced? What are being deprecated? You know, if a security file is deprecated, you probably need to not just deprecate it, but immediately figure out what it is that it's being replaced with, because that is potentially a security hole in your application. You don't want to open up your systems to hackers. So this is just kind of another little thing about improving your core skills. That is a life benefit to protect yourself and your software. The other thing I kind of wanted to touch on, again, was that coding standards and best practices. So the other cool thing about that kitchen sink app is, you know, if you try to do best practices, so you write one way that you think is best practice today. Well, six months from now, pull it back up. OK, what has changed? Or as you have been working, did you do something different that is now a better practice that you need to update your kitchen sink app or keep track of? So as you're going through the process of your daily jobs, if you see something that is new or you don't quite understand, take 15, 20 minutes, go look it up, go Google it or write it down and look it up tomorrow. One of the key things that personally I try to do every single day, and this is a habit I've been doing for many years now, is every single day I want to learn one thing new that I did not know yesterday. I don't care if it's a language, I don't care if it's best practice, but I always start out by looking at what it is that I'm doing. What is there that I can add, improve or learn to help my current situation or to get me to that next project, that next step in my career? So these core skills are not just about improving your technology skills, but they can also benefit your coding, but they can improve your kind of step through your progress to that next goal in your career. So our challenge for this week ahead is, like Michael just alluded to, pick something new every day. You're going to learn something new every day. Now the challenge for this, I think in order to make it easier to step into this habit is on the first day, or actually probably before you get into the first day, even spend a little bit of extra time in that first day and pick something new that you need to learn more about. It doesn't matter what it is. It could be, for example, I want to learn about the latest version of the language that's out there that I'm using right now, or I want to learn more about the underlying mechanics of a template, of a framework that I'm using. For example, like I, maybe I used Hibernate all the time. I'm going to spend some time learning what SQL is and how to use it. I'm going to spend some time learning what SQL is and how it would do the things that the tool does for me, or look at what is your language de jour, your language of choice, maybe even right now. The ones you're in the most, and just spend time looking at best practices. Not necessarily, although it could be very useful if your company has, if your organization has coding standards, is make sure that you're going back and taking a look at those coding standards. Spend a little time every day, but also like maybe why would that matter? Why would that be useful? Is get a little bit more into it. So you're not just, oh, this is why we do this. This is what we do. But so you have a little bit of an idea of why do we do that? Do that every day and just like mark out time, 10 to 15 minutes every day for the next week that you, your goal is I'm going to learn a little bit more and give yourself a, in this case, it's like give yourself a sort of a stretch goal of the week and say, all right, I want to learn, for example, I'm going to learn more about the net, the current version of this language. So what you can do is each day say, Hey, I'm going to go out to maybe the vendor site and they've got a whole bunch of information, but I'm going to read. I'm going to take a look at what is, what are the, what's the features that got added in this version? I'm going to look at maybe a go search for some articles on how does this change from the prior version or what are some benefits I can take advantage of in the new version? Maybe you go search, maybe part of this, you go search for a podcast or two that you're going to listen to now for a while that are based on, they talk about that topic or that's what their focus is or a site where you're going to read daily blogs or something along those lines, or maybe you're just going to like a tech crunch or one of those kinds of places. I'm assuming that still exists. You're going to one of those places and you're just going to, that's going to be your search topic and you're just going to start your day and spend that 10 to 15 minutes reading an article on that topic. What is the latest article on that topic? Do that every day. And then when you get to the end of the week, hopefully you'll be able to look back and say, well, I've really progressed in what I know about that topic, whatever that chosen topic is. Now this again, I really would, I think it's really important for you to do this in the development world. Now it doesn't have to be exactly the development stuff you're working on. So if you're a, let's say you're a middle tier developer, maybe what you do is you're going to go spend the next week. And I just want to have, I'm going to have seven questions I'm going to answer of how do I do this in HTML and JavaScript, or how do I do this using the, in a graphical environment that is the one that is the front end to the work that I do if you're a front end developer, maybe it is how do I, how do I create an API? How do I create an API call or how do I create a database or how do I, you know, how do I actually work with a database other than through the means that you have right now, these are all great ways. Asking those questions of like, how does this actually work? Why does it work? Those kinds of things are going to help you get a deeper knowledge of what you use. And it's actually, I think a lot of times going to make you utilize that better because now you understand the why a little bit more and you're not just using it blindly, you actually understand why you're doing this and it will help you moving forward. That being said, it's time for us to wrap this one up. So if you have any questions, comments, feedback, particularly on the challenges that we've given you, shoot us an email at info at developinure.com. You can also leave us contacts. We've got comments and we have a contact form on developinure.com. You can leave comments and feedback out on YouTube at the developinure channel. Send us stuff on X at developinure. We have a Facebook page, the developinure page is out there. I think we do. I'm forget for sure. We have one out in LinkedIn or develop our Facebook. I am not our social media person. So check around, search developinure. And if you find it great, let me know. It may be a site that we forgot we had, but maybe not that bad. But that being said, we love your feedback. Love to hear from you. We'd love to know where we can help you be better. So as always go out there and have yourself a great day, a great week, and we will talk to you next time. Thank you for listening to Building Better Developers, the Develop-a-Nure Podcast. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon, anywhere that you can find podcasts, we are there. And remember just a little bit of effort every day ends up adding into great momentum and great success.