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Additionally, it’s important to write down all the guidelines for handling certain implementation details like error handling or asynchronous communication between software components. However, with a team you have a whole lot more reasons to acquire and practice good writing skills.įirst of all, you need to write things down for the rest of the team to understand the reasoning behind decisions and reproduce the way more complex business logic works. The reasons for writing things down are basically the same as for solo developers. In general, professional software development is a team effort. Home on the range junior scratchpad how to#The same applies also to writing down things about how to build and deploy the application and all the other instructions which are necessary to get it working again. Your future self probably will have problems to reproduce your thought process to understand what you did there. A good indication about when this is appropriate is when you worked on the solution for a longer period of time until you could finally make it work. Home on the range junior scratchpad code#That’s why I always tell people to write down the stuff about the code that is not immediately obvious. Additionally, in the meantime you probably learned lots of stuff about how to do things better or more elegantly. However, after some time has passed this mental model as either become blurred or even completely lost. This is not surprising since you had a lot more knowledge about the problem you wanted to solve when you were working on it. At least I’ve been in this situation more than once. Let me ask you a question: Have you ever looked at some code you’ve written a couple of days, weeks, month or even years ago? I bet it took you some time to understand how the code works, what it tries to achieve and what edge cases it handles. So why should you bother and waste time to write down even the least amount of proper documentation? You already know everything about the codebase because you have build it by yourself. Maybe it’s even just an application for your personal use. In some cases you might be working as a sole developer on a project. There are at least three reasons for doing this. I think that it’s a good investment for every developer to acquire good writing skills while he is improving his core skills as a developer. Especially, it’s a real challenge for the junior colleagues because of their lack of experience. Unfortunately, this does not hold true for the vast majority of professional software developers. ![]() In the past, I was actually very fortunate to witness this in some rare occasions. For some developers, the ones with lots of experience and discipline, this might actually be true. We are also pretty creative when it comes to the reasons why we do not do it: it’s more important to ship features, the code itself and especially the accompanying test cases act as documentation, etc. In reality we as software developers try to get around writing down stuff as much as possible. Home on the range junior scratchpad manuals#Moreover, I’m convinced that this skill will get more and more important in the future and is a distinguishing factor between an average developer and an excellent one.Īllow me to justify the reasoning behind my opinion.Īs professional software developers we are already used to write a lot of documentation, right? We are documenting our code, document architectural design decisions and development guidelines, write down instructions for building and deploying our software and prepare manuals for the users of our applications. In my opinion, good writing skills are almost as important for a developer as his ability to write good code. For this, a developer needs to master not only programming languages and frameworks but also a rich set of tools (like IDEs), design patterns and development practices, like Test-driven Development (TDD).īesides this fundamental set of skills there’s an additional one which is oftentimes overlooked or undervalued by many developers: Writing. This means he must be able to write code that is concise, readable, testable, performant, etc. There’s no doubt that the main skill of any software developer is to write good code regardless of the programming language and the platform he is specialized on. ![]()
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