Developing Developers

Many developers learn on the job, make mistakes and move on. In the first of this two-part series, Dave Stewart offers some insights to help ensure you aren’t leaving a trail of technical debt in your wake.

- Dave Stewart

For those of you with less than five years’ experience in web development, it’s likely you’re still finding your feet in regards to language features, frameworks, architecture and best practices. And although you may start each site with the best intentions, by the end, chances are all you want is for the thing to work well enough that you get paid.

I’ve spent the past few years rescuing a variety of well-known brands’ sites that in theory should have been simple, but for a variety of reasons – successions of freelancers, a lack of top-down supervision – have turned into spaghetti-junctions of technical debt.

In this first article of a two-part series, I’ll cover the main problems and practices that led to these situations, and give you some pointers to ensure you don’t make the same mistakes.

AWKWARD HOME TRUTHS

The thing I want to get out of the way is to assure you that we’ve all been there, and there’s nothing wrong with not knowing everything. Programming is brilliant fun, and the reason you want to do it every day is probably because you get to rise to a challenge, take the lead and deliver innovative solutions. But here’s the catch: what makes programming fun (being inventive and thinking on your feet) can inadvertently contribute to technical debt on larger, team-led projects.

There exist established best practices, principles and patterns that have proven themselves over the years. It’s your job to research, learn and implement them – and in the process, sacrifice a little of your individuality in return for maintainability and reliability. There’s a blog post called ‘You’re not paid to write code’ that sums it up rather well: netm.ag/code-290.

GET THE FOUNDATIONS RIGHT WHEN YOU BEGIN