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It Took Me 20+ Years To Learn This Lesson About Dev

Matt Butcher on May 01, 2024

I started my software development career as a web developer. I worked at companies large and small, including stints at HP and Google. At Microsoft...
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Paweł Ciosek

Great post! 👏👏

Do you have any advice how to build a good documentation? 📃

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Santiago G. Marín

If you use code comments, you can also use a tool to convert code comments into docs (like JSDoc or TSDoc) and I have to say that Copilot does a great job describing functionality at code level.

It's also a good practice to have PRDs and Tech Specs describing the whys and hows. Notion is particularly helpful at that.

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Michael Tharrington

Great post, Matt! Lots of awesome advice in here. 🙌

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Michael Pollaci

Fantastic!

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jaustinUF

Anyone blogging about writing code today should (at least) mention that we (humans) won’t be writing code for much longer.

However, the concepts here are useful to consider when translated into the future: just replace ‘code/coding’ with ‘system description/design.’ Anytime I’m wring code I’m thinking about how ‘this’ would be done through AI, and considering whether to use those techniques on this project. For me, ‘not yet’ … but I can see it coming.

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Santiago G. Marín

This is a fantastic read. Most of what you mention I also figured out along the way but never had the chance to put it all in an article like this one. I think I'll add it to my team's coding guidelines. Thanks for sharing!

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Anmol Baranwal • Edited

I think I understand your perspective; that's why I always check dependencies and other stuff when choosing a third-party library for production-level code.
It would save us trouble later on, so it's better to understand the requirements and then make the right decision.

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Peham Raza

I inherited a legacy project and was tasked to fix and maintain it, I worked on it for a few years. The project was created by several developers over the years. Once I came accross a beautiful piece of code, well documented, well written, clearly it stood out from all the garbabe I have been dealing.
I got curious I pulled git history, that code was mine, written 6 months ago.
It is worth mentioning that I have been coding from past 12 years & as you can see I could not even recognize my code from 6 months ago.
So dears, as highlighted in this article, beautiful code is easy to maintain and you are not only doing a favor to people who will be dealing with it in future but to yourself as well.
Best of luck :)

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skidrow406

great

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Troy Gooden

Great article! Loved the quotes.

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Omojola Tomiloba David

I find this really helpful

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Ashley D • Edited

Upvote on the documentation! I find comments super helpful to refer back to when I'm looking at projects I did a few weeks ago to refresh memory on the what and why for my code approach. ❤️
Excellent share @technosophos!

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Dorothy_Jay

Agree with you

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Ario Setiawan

Even no picture within it, it's easy to understand because detail explanation :O

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Masud Al Imran

Thank you for sharing your insight. Really helpful.

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FreeCoderX

The React source code is a counter-example

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Shubham Sigdar

Nice article

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77pintu • Edited

Thanks for the great post !!!

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Rodgers Nyangweso

awesome awesome content here. very helpful indeed.

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Paul Miller