Eric Elliot sent a tweet with a question: What do you think is the biggest / most common mistake software developers make?
. I think it’s worth it to collect them here into one list.
- technology is not politically neutral
- underestimating the time something will take
- deferring technical debt
- “copy & paste”
- coming up with patterns, just for the sake of patterns; solving real life problems is what they should do
- chronically adopting new tools and frameworks, and leaving no time to learn or embrace the fundamentals
- not testing
- devs not willing to expand & experiment new ways of thinking about programming; thinking they know it all
- being afraid of learning from someone junior to yourself
- thinking they are too smart because they can “speak” technology and being too stubborn to recognize own failures and weak spots
- not knowing how to separate work coding from play/hack coding
- overthinking
- follows patterns blindly without questioning why, nor stopping to create a better pattern
- they think they need to implement everything, in all areas, right away, rather than consciously iterating on their practice
- learning by imitating others’ code rather than learning how things really work
- getting comfortable at jobs that limit their career trajectories
From my side:
- proper testing is what should take place before shipping any product
- minimum 95% of test coverage must be done; perfectly 99%
- misunderstanding the purpose of test coverage reports
- misunderstanding what’s the linting tools are for
- afraid of changes
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