Coomey.net

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.