Don’t Touch That Code! by Cal Evans

It has happened to every one of us at some point. Your code was rolled onto the staging server for system testing, and the testing manager writes back that she has hit a problem. Your first reaction is

“Quick, let me fix that—I know what’s wrong.”

Check Your Code First Before Looking to Blame Others by Allan Kelly

Developers —ALL OF US !—often have trouble believing our own code is broken. It is just so improbable that, for once, it must be the compiler that’s broken.

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Hard Work Does Not Pay Off by Olve Maudal

As a programmer, you ’ll find that working hard often does not pay off. You might fool yourself and a few colleagues into believing that you are contributing a lot to a project by spending long hours at the office.

Don’t Just Learn the Language, Understand Its Culture by Anders Norås

In high school, I had to learn a foreign language. At the time, I thought that I’d get by nicely being good at English, so I chose to sleep through three years of French class.

Read Code by Karianne Berg

We Programmers are Weird Creatures. We love writing code. But when it comes to reading it, we usually shy away. After all, writing code is so much more fun, and reading code is hard—sometimes almost impossible. Reading other people’s code is particularly hard. Not necessarily because other people’s code is bad, but because they probably think and solve problems in a different way than you. But did you ever consider that reading someone else’s code could improve your own?

Do Lots of Deliberate Practice by Jon Jagger

Deliberate Practice is Not Simply Performing a Task. If you ask yourself, “Why am I performing this task?” and your answer is, “To complete the task,” then you’re not doing deliberate practice.

Continuous Learning by Clint Shank

WE LiVE iN iNTERESTiNG TiMES. As development gets distributed across the globe, you learn there are lots of people capable of doing your job. You need to keep learning to stay marketable. Otherwise you’ll become a dinosaur, stuck in the same job until, one day, you’ll no longer be needed or your job gets out-sourced to some cheaper resource.