I often see the article  or blog post “how to be a better developer” and sometimes there might be a hidden gem contained in the text but often it seems that most of the guidance is vague or abstract and hard to really put into practice.

Then, I found this:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/mastering-programming/1184427814923414

A friend at work sent it to me – It’s an excellent short summary of some habits, practices and behaviour that make a difference in enterprise software engineering. What resonated for me is that there a quite a few elements that Beck mentions that I can’t remember seeing in articles on the subject including:

• Call your shot. Before you run code, predict out loud exactly what will happen.
  • Dom’s  Comment: “Nothing like doing a quick walkthrough of what you’ve just built”
• Remove extraneous detail. When reporting a bug, find the shortest repro steps. When isolating a bug, find the shortest test case. When using a new API, start from the most basic example. “All that stuff can’t possibly matter,” is an expensive assumption when it’s wrong.
  • Dom’s  Comment: “If the API has a Ping method just get that going first”
• Aesthetics. Beauty is a powerful gradient to climb. It is also a liberating gradient to flout (e.g. inlining a bunch of functions into one giant mess).
  • Dom’s  Comment: “Have a look at well formatted SQL code and compare it to the madness of all being on one line”

Great Great Article for any developer