Season 4 Episode 4

Welcome to another episode. It's been a little while I've been very busy with a lot of things so apologies for the delay in getting an episode out. This one is about something that's been bothering me.

You see lots of posts about things like top five tips for being the best uber developer in the world, ten ways to make your environment super fast, three ways that I've improved my production flow, and all of these kinds of things, and that's all well and good.

But what you don't see very often is tips on how to take care of yourself as a developer and approach it from that aspect.

Forget the frameworks, forget the projects, forget all of that stuff. What about you, you as a developer, us as developers, what about those kinds of things? So that's what we're going to cover in this episode. I reached out to you all on Twitter and got some replies.

What are some great tips you would give to developers about actually being a developer? I’m looking to list some in the podcast with credit you you, so comment and get a mention. Thanks!

— CompileSwift (@CompileSwift) February 20, 2022

Thank you to you all. We'll go through them here.

Okay, first up is to take breaks. Now, I don't mean just physical breaks. I mean, mental breaks and you can roll these into one. What I want you to do is to remember, to get up and move around. So the idea here is that you get up, you move away from your workstation, whatever that may be, a desk or a standing desk or whatever it is, just move away from it.

Please leave those phones and all the other devices behind as well. The idea here is you get up and have some physical movement along with a mental break, actually disengaging your brain from all of this input coming in through all of your devices. Now, this may not sound like a big deal, but it is.

The next is something that is very hard for me to do because I'm a night owl, but I try my best. That is to remember that late night and all nighters get harder as you get older now.

Yeah. When you're one of those young developers, you can just keep going and going and then crash. That's all well and good and fine if that's what you want to do. But as we get older, we also have more responsibilities and let's be honest, our brains just start to work differently.

Working an all-nighter is a sure-fire way to burn yourself out quickly. It's also a sign that you're either being pushed or pushing yourself too hard. None of this is healthy and you might think there's some reward for this at the end of it.

Remember if you're doing this to meet deadlines for other people, they will start to see this as normal.

Trust me. I have worked in more than enough places and more than enough teams to know that this is what happens. If you perform miracles on a regular basis, they stop being miracles in the eyes of other people and they become the normal expected workload for you.

And that's your new standard and where do you go from there? There is nowhere left to go. It's okay to do it once in a while. But, try and keep it to a minimum. This is not a healthy thing. I really want you to take this one into consideration.

Here are some tips from folks I got from Twitter Thanks.

A problem I see a lot is over-abstraction. Yes, you have to think about code quality, but you also have to be pragmatic. If your code has layers and layers of some architecture, it's time to scale back and think about what's practical and maintainable.

— Andy Ibanez (@AndyIbanezK) February 20, 2022

You WILL go through cycles of thinking you’re a brilliant, BRILLIANT individual, followed by thinking you’re the stupidest person on the planet. Get used to them. They happen to all us. It comes with the job.

— Steve (@geekpharaoh) February 20, 2022

Maybe we'll have round two of this. I am sure there are a lot more and hopefully as you've been listening to this, you've thought of some yourself.

So share them with us, share them with the communities and let's just make life better for us all. And remember that, your skills are only as useful as the vehicle that you carry them around in and that's you so take care of it.

That's it. Everybody take care. Thank you so much.

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