10 Things All Software Engineers Should Know

“10 Things All Software Engineers Should Know”
Tom Harrison’s Blog, March 15, 2011
Development, Css3, Design, Performance, Profiling
By Tom Harrison

I am in the interesting position at the moment of managing a team of people writing software who have almost no training or experience in software development. I find two things truly remarkable: first, that any modestly sophisticated working system can be made using code written by people that know almost nothing about software, and second, that smart people, who are motivated, can learn how to do things better pretty quickly.

I chastised one of our developers today for cut-and-paste coding, and only realized in his response that he literally has never had anyone give him feedback or guidance — he didn’t realize cutting and pasting code was bad. It occurred to me that, as a mostly self-taught developer, there were some good books that I read that helped me understand (but these were for C and C++). I didn’t immediately come across anything like that for a modern language.

So I thought I would think about the things I think are most important.

My Top 10 List:
1. Names Matter

2. Follow Conventions Religiously

3. Code Should Look Beautiful

4. Keep It Short and Simple (KISS)

5. Don’t Repeat Yourself (DRY)

6. Don’t Hard-Code

7. You’re Not A Developer if You Don’t Know Databases

8. Same With Regular Expressions

9. Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years

10. Make It Work, Make It Beautiful, Make It Fast

And many more… [You’ll have to read the full article to get all the details and find out the more part.]