Ten habits of highly productive developers

After 20 years in software development, I decided to write a book about everything I learned about software development. After fiddling around with margins and fonts for almost 30 minutes, I decided to write a blog post instead. I completed that task in less than 5 minutes.

Here they are. Ten habits of highly productive developers.

1. Don’t waste time reading random sh*t on the internet.
2. Do everything yourself. Don’t waste time interacting with coworkers. You are the best so they will slow you down.
3. Decide what the customer needs and implement that. Don’t waste time on discussing requirements, writing documentation or demonstrating how things work. If they want it bad enough, they will find out how it works.
4. Avoid all kind of administrative tasks. Never estimate time. Never plan ahead. Never register time.
5. Don’t waste time searching if someone else has implemented the functionality you need. Write it yourself. It will be better and faster.
6. Use short names for variables, methods, classes, namespaces. They take up less space in the file system and less space on the monitor so you can have more code on screen at the same time. Reuse names across the source code and they will be extremely fast to load. 
7. If some dude enforced that you need to link commits to tickets with comments, have one ticket called miscellaneous changes and link every commit to that. Use . as comment.
8. Always be late for meetings. Join online and skip as many as you can. Mute the meeting and write code instead. If someone asks you a direct question, say yeah that will work. If they look puzzled, say it's a bit technical and suggest to discuss it after the meeting.

This is good stuff. I don’t even think you need ten. 80% is good enough so let’s wrap it. 😉

Disclaimer

This being the internet, just in case you didn't catch it: Above is written tongue-in-cheek and out of great love for the art of writing computer programs in a team. As always with good satire, there is some truth to it. Maybe you recognise yourself in these? Which habits make you productive? Do they also make your team productive? If nothing else, I hope you had a good laugh. Have a nice day!