Walk the Walk...

17 02 2006

I ran across a really good blog entry by Clay Loveless (of Feedster fame) yesterday that really cut to the heart of what it means to call yourself a software developer. In his words: discipline. I highly recommend everyone who considers themselves a developer to give this a read and check his bullet points against their own development methodologies. Here's some of my favorite points from his blog entry:

  • You must be disciplined enough to write well-documented code.
    Yes, functionality counts, but if you're hit by a bus (or trampled by
    your fan club at an ego-rally) tomorrow, someone else has to take over
    your stuff and make sense out of it. For a pro, documentation isn't
    grunt work left to the community, or the peons. The pro just does it
    because it's what pros do.
  • You must be disciplined enough to write code with error reporting (by whatever name your language of choice calls it) cranked to the max. use strict error_reporting(E_STRICT) on PHP5 or error_reporting(E_ALL) on PHP4, whatever: these modes of development
    weren't created to annoy you, they were created to save your ass and
    hopefully help you evolve into a better developer. Writing new code
    under something as sloppy as 'error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE)' should
    be an absolute last resort.

Enjoy.


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