After reading a recent LinkedIn post ("12 bad developer habits holding you back"), these are the first 10 Good Habits to adopt that came to my mind:
- Read lots of code - especially outside your organization/domain...serendipity will find you more easily.
- Read the documentation first (e.g., libraries you plan to use)
- Keep a personal journal (ideally, published somewhere, e.g., github, a blog, etc.) - document your experiments, lessons learned - share to help others - and benefit by elevating your professional visibility.
- Invest time in thinking, before coding - it will pay great dividends.
- Iterate quickly.
- Focus on getting it working first, then performance (80/20 applies, usually to this guidance).
- Learn to be your team's EXPERT in your debugging tools.
- Before saying "yes, we can do that" - understand the trade-offs, the ROI, and the business value you are creating.
- Learn/understand the business domain, deeply.
- Think in multiple dimensions - what are the upstream/downstream, and left/right - impacts and dependencies.