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Developer priorities throughout their career

Reading Time: 3 minutes

I made this chart in the amazing Excalidraw about two weeks ago:

It only took me 10 minutes! Shortly after, my laptop broke down into repeated kernel panics, and it spent about 10 days in service (I was in a remote place when it broke, so it took some time to get it to service). Yesterday, I was finally reunited with it, turned it on, launched Chrome, and saw it again. It gave me a smile, and I realized I never got to post it, so I tweeted this:

The tweet kinda blew up! It seems many, many developers identify with it. A few also disagreed with it, especially with the “Does it actually work?” line. So I figured I should write a bit about the rationale behind it. I originally wrote it in a tweet, but then I realized I should probably post it in a less transient medium, that is more well suited to longer text.

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To write good code, you sometimes have to write bad code

Reading Time: < 1 minuteAnd I’m not referring to learning.

For example, yesterday I was trying to write code for something and it ended up beng harder than I expected. It’s one of those rare cases where you can fully imagine how the solution should work, enough to tell it to another person, but you can’t put your thoughts to code and you feel you’re not smart enough.

I find that in those cases, it helps a lot to open a new editor window and try to write code that just works. Without being elegant, fast or maintainable. Just something that works properly. And after you manage to put your thoughts into (bad) code, it’s easy to refine it from there and end up with good code.

Just don’t stop at the bad code, like many beginners do. It’s like when designers sketch a rough draft for a logo, before drawing the digital version. Could you imagine how horrible it would be if they wanted to stop there and give the rough sketches to the client instead? 🙂