5 Development Tips I Wish I Knew 2 Years Ago

Inspired by this post, Ten Web Development Tips I Wish I’d Known Two Years Ago, from Hackification, I’m going to list 5 Development tips I wish I had learned earlier and better.

1. Learn the basics first:
I don’t have a degree in Computer Science – I’m a self-taught programmer and web developer. A lot of things I leanred from copy and paste programming – finding some good code that works, and implementing it. That’s fine for getting things done – but you can really limit yourself if you don’t understand why things work or how it works as well. Learning early on to cover the basics of programming will save you a lot of debugging time later on, I promise.

2. Read the Docs – Read them over once before you start, and then follow along while you code. This is especially true for API specifications.
a. Keep reading the docs. Some programming projects can go on for months – keeping checking the API docs for errata and changes. Especially web service API docs like Amazon, Twitter, Facebook. These can change often and drastically. You’ll save a lot of time making choices based on the future instead of back-tracking to fix things that used to work and suddenly stopped.

3. When you get stuck, ask for help. Post to forums with your questions. Go to the official site of the technology you’re using, and sign up for their forums. Chances are any serious issues you run into have been experienced before, and someone has answered the question on those forums. I usually give myself 3 hours to work on any one problem, and if I’m still not making any progress, I go look for help. Asking specific questions is the most effective method, and always include some code (especially if you think you’ve narrowed it down to where the issue is occurring).

4. Release early and often – so many times I’ve sat around tweaking things, only to see another web site or app get released and generate buzz that should have belonged to me. The lesson? Pare down your initial release to stuff you can get done NOW, versus the ‘nice-to-have’ stuff you can do later.

5. Don’t get stuck on one (or two) language(s) – When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. You don’t want to be writing crons in java and web applications in cgi (well, of course you can – but do you really want to?) – if you have multiple tools for multiple platforms, you’ll never be stuck trying to overcode a solution to small problems that could be more quickly and easily solved with another language.