Unrelated image from pexels.com to make this post look nicer in social media shares.

In my last post I said that being a better programmer wasn’t worth sacrificing your entire life outside of work, but that doesn’t mean being a better programmer isn’t worth some work. Also, sacrificing all of your free time is simply not necessary. There are lots of things you can do to be better that don’t involve never seeing your friends again and/or being a bad partner. Lots of them!

Here’s tip #1 for being a better dev without killing yourself over it:

Communication!

Specifically, when you get a task, ask some questions to make sure you understand it. Some of the most important questions are the ones you’re scared to ask because you don’t want to look stupid. Like “What is feature x for?” Just because the JIRA ticket says to build an x doesn’t mean the business really needs an x. They might actually need outcome y and think that building an x is the way to get it.

Once you understand why the business needs an x you might be able to suggest a simpler solution – sometimes you don’t need a week of dev time, sometimes all you need is a cron job. Sometimes there’s a library that can do what you need quickly and easily. Sometimes there’s a product or service that does what you need for less than the cost of the dev time, plus if it breaks you may be able to make it their customer support’s problem instead of yours :)

Even if you don’t have a better solution, it’s really helpful to understand why you’re doing something and what you’re really supposed to accomplish. No spec is ever perfect, you’re practically always going to have to make some decisions on your own – knowing the reason behind what you’re doing lets you make way better decisions than if you’re just trying to guess what might make sense. That’s how things nobody wants get built (well, one of many ways they get built, let’s not pretend there’s only one cause) – somebody gets a vague spec, takes their best guess, maybe runs into some problems and has to cut part of it, maybe some of the parts that get cut are actually really important but the dev didn’t know that and now we’ve got a feature nobody wants.

Another good reason to ask questions is to clarify the spec. If you run into anything that needs more details or contradicts some other part of the spec, it’s better to know that before you start building. Nobody likes having to go to their boss after days of development and tell them that they just realised that to build the feature properly they need to build z too and that means they have to throw out the code they already wrote that only supports x and y. Nobody likes hearing that either, so think of the time you spend asking questions as an investment in not disappointing your boss/missing your deadline later.

You might find a whole extra set of problems that need to be figured out before you can build the thing you were originally supposed to. On a large project at work I found out partway through that I hadn’t put nearly enough thought into how new settings for an extension of an existing feature were going to work with the original settings. I could have saved myself a lot of time building and rebuilding handling for that if I had asked more questions in the beginning (and done a better job of planning everything out before I started building it, but that’s a separate blog post).

Not only are complications like that really useful to know about for the sake of building something only once, but the feature might get scoped down or cut entirely if it’s too much of a hassle to do it properly. That might sound disappointing but how much more would it suck to waste days or weeks of time on something that’s never going to work correctly?

And the bet part? Asking questions about work while you’re at work doesn’t touch your free time at all!