11 Habits of Highly Effective Developers

syntax. How are you doing, Scott? Hey. Doing good. It is crazy windy here in Denver.

There are downed branches everywhere.

Man, the wind is unreal. So if a tree falls on my office in the middle of this recording, I Wes, just hope that it does not land on my head because It's a tree fall. Yeah. Wes got big old trees right above me right here. Just they're they're rocking, man. It it's crazy.

So, yeah, we were actually walking to our kids' soccer practice yesterday, and there were so many we're just stepping over giant branches because it was this windy yesterday too. We're just, like, stepping over giant branches. I'm just like, I I hope one of these does not fall on my my head while I'm walking to practice here. So, hey. I'm doing good, man. It's just, I'm getting blown away by the wind. How are you doing?

Yeah. And we talked a little bit about this in a recent episode, 754, how to level up your your career, we talked about needing to understand stakeholders and business goals. But you might be wondering about, like, why in particular that matters to the developer. You Node, that's somebody else's job. I'm the developer. I just push the code out.

I think it it distinctly matters with the, not only the care, but maybe like the direction and handling of the user experiences that you're coding them.

If the goal of this thing is to bring delight or if it's to feel very smooth and professional, you you wanna be a a good developer and, like, account for those UI things regardless. Right? You want the experience to feel good.

But if you understand that this is of the highest importance that this thing feels and looks pristine when you're using it because of these following business goals, then you might take a different approach to some of that user interface programming.

But more importantly, you're gonna be motivated to work on these things in a different way, but you'll also be able to accomplish the goals of the stakeholders and the business goals, and it's gonna make you look really good professionally.

So you'll do better work if you understand the goals. You'll have context for the code that you're writing and why it matters.

And ultimately, I think it's just going to make you look good in the eyes of your management.

And some people are really I I do gotta say this because I know we talked about this a little bit before. Some people are a little cynical about all that that stuff. And I understand being cynical about a crappy job or, you know, feeling maybe potentially exploited by your crappy job.

But I think there is a sweet spot there of when you have respect within your organization, it is a good thing to, you know, I I guess not like go above and beyond, but to understand the bigger picture here and be be a a different kind of impact maker for your team.

Next 1 is habit number 2, you're always curious and always learning.

And this is something that is hard to cultivate, but I think it really can be solved through motivation, understanding would things get you going about web development. What do I like building? Me, personally, I like building little tools for myself. I like building cool little JavaScript things. I like building neat CSS, kind of working with new APIs, new technologies.

So to be curious and always learning for me involves really watering that. Like, if I'm a plant, I'm I'm watering those skills all the time because those are the things that I really truly enjoy about this stuff. And it keeps me curious, and it keeps me always learning.

The moment that you really start to fall back into the same thing all the time, every time, you can get stuck doing the same thing for the rest of of your career. You know? Yeah. And next thing you know, you're the the cold fusion guy at, the place that's running a cold fusion app. Although, I think some of those cold fusion devs are probably making bank right now. Sure. But that's it. That's what you wanna do. Maybe maybe that's what you're learning about. Maybe you're learning about the intricacies

again, very successful habit. Yeah. I I have a note here that things exist for a reason. People don't just make things for no reason. You know? Usually especially smart people, people who have been in this industry a long time. So if you if there's certain people that have already created things that are very effective and they create something new and you're looking at this like, I don't know why you need this.

Maybe the issue is with how you're approaching it or thinking it. I mean, we just had Johannes on to talk about effect.

And I was looking at effect, effect.tsoreffect.website, I believe, is their actual website.

And the 1st time I looked at effect, I said, well, I don't get I don't get why I need this. This seems like a lot of work.

Then actually getting some time with it and working in languages and things that it that's, you know, is emulating, I was like, oh, yeah. I really see what they're trying to do here with effect.

But at at first glance, I look at the code, and it it looks foreign to me. And the first thing you say is, I don't I don't know what this is. I must not like like garbage. You know? Yeah. Yeah. It's not the thing I'm used to looking at. Therefore, it's bad.

Yeah. Yeah. I had I had the same reaction with a lot of things. Node, I ended up really liking Zod. Drizzle, I ended up really liking Drizzle. It is just it's not that I'm a bad take machine or something like that. Yeah. It it's that again, when you don't understand things, it's really easy to look at them from a perspective of that. It's maybe perhaps not what I need. Yes.

Yes. It's a sign of a developer who will lack professional growth in there. Mhmm. What they're they're working in. Habit number 4, you ask for help.

Asking for help is not a sign of weakness. It's a sign of curiosity.

It's a sign of you have problems that you've created or perhaps that you've been, assigned to fix that someone else created.

And you could be out out to lunch on where to even go from this.

Asking for help is one of those things that can save you a whole lot of time. I know this. I don't want to ask for help Oftentimes, the amount of times, Courtney will tell me to call someone, and I will say, no.

I got it. Let me do it.

It's the classic that's like a classic marriage joke. I will I do not need to ask for directions.

I know where to go.

You don't always know where to go. Asking for directions can save you hours or days. Now sometimes it's good to not ask for help because you can pick up a lot of things on the way. But if you're totally in the dark, you're not gonna have suddenly everything be illuminated right away for no reason. So asking for help, especially for, for somebody that you know and trust their opinion of JS a great thing. There's so many times. I'm I'm blessed that I have the resource of Wes Bos to ping and say, hey. Is this a terrible idea? And sometimes sometimes you just say you'll respond back like, why is this different than this? And I'll say, gosh, Darny. He got me. He's right. It's not any different than this. What was I thinking? So, yeah, it's great. Ask him.

I yeah. I absolutely totally agree on this. You Node? I I think, me, personally, I got, you know, my start in this regard.

Like you said, IRC was like a big one. You kind of see the way other people are helping or teaching or anything in IRC.

And if somebody asks a question I remember being a young enough developer. Somebody asked a question and I have this unique piece of knowledge or it's maybe not unique and I'm just the guy who's there. I couldn't I couldn't type fast enough to get them the answer because it was like, that's a little bit of, like, nerd clout being able to to give answers in this way. But also, you know, I guess that's what the whole premise of Stack Overflow really was. But helping others, it can give you more experience ESLint application stacks that aren't your own. Everybody does things just a little bit differently. My favorite thing when helping others is if somebody comes to me with a reproduction or, like, potentially, here's a good one in the Svelte world. They have the Svelte Wes where you can share and quickly share code examples.

Somebody comes onto the Svelte Discord with a REPL of the issue they're having, I can solve that thing in no time. I I you know, that that's like the the sweet spot. So if somebody's coming in with real code, it's easy to use, it's easy to test out, help them, man. Give that give that muscle a little bit of a a flex there. And not just not just for nerd cloud or anything like that, but to get your own brain out of your own code.

I do think that is something that we don't do often enough. You're very comfortable in your own code. You're very comfortable sitting on the couch with your muscle memory for all the files you need to go to and the CSS classes you know warp there. But then you go into somebody else's home and everything is totally foreign. The the the food that their mom makes is very different than the food that your mom made.

Do you remember doing that going over to somebody's house and their parents made some bad food or something?

right off the bone. Yeah. Neanderthal style, for sure.

Yes. Being able to take a a step back and solve problems in a less stressed way will really, really help you. It'll help you, like you said, deconstruct what you're working on, being able to to find even inventive or creative ways to solve those problems. You Node, so many people, they wanna go to perhaps, the I wanna use the console log or the debugger or, like, the the tools that we Node. But they don't ever think, like, what are the the less conventional methods of debugging? I'm just gonna comment everything out and start commenting things in until it works again. That works. But just being able to be creative in trying to solve these problems. You know what? Wes it's one thing that, like, my daughter is really into puzzles. Right? That's all she asks for for her birthday. She loves puzzles. She'll do 5 or 6 puzzles back to back, and I think this girl's gonna be a great engineer because she loves taking a situation and seeing a jumbled mess and then figuring out what the picture is. And I think that's something that developers maybe don't do enough JS we don't look at our job as being essentially professional puzzle solvers. I am a puzzle solver.

That is what I do in my job. Typically, I have a puzzle.

It's a UI that needs built. It's a bug that's coming about or I'm doing something really wild, and, I have a general idea of the outcome. Like, I have a finished picture of what this finished puzzle will look like, and I have a whole lot of pieces, and I need to just put this thing together and figure out exactly what's going on. So being able to, 1, keep your cool when there are problems, but, 2, being able to take take a minute to take a bigger picture and think about this puzzle or this problem, break it down, solve this problem, and not only that, I think be interested enough or excited enough to do that.

It is wild how related those skills end up being.

It it is really one of those things where you don't necessarily realize what you're doing is software development adjacent until you take that bigger picture look. Heck, playing, Factorio or any of those, like, games that are building systems and networks and stuff like that. You are doing software development. You are solving a problem, and those skills will come in handy no matter what you're doing. I you you in particular Wes have really opened my brain about solving things that aren't software related. Because in my life, I would typically in the past have been like, alright.

Software, I I got this. You Node? It's it's UNIX. I know this.

But but, like, if I were to look at my, leaf blower or my chainsaw or something like that and it stopped working, I would be like, I don't know. Now, after seeing you open up everything, I just start opening stuff up.

I don't know what I'm looking for, but I'll I'll open it up and and just look for things that don't look right, capacitors or, who knows what. Right? Yeah. Often that you throw it in the like, I always say Wes case, you throw it in the f ed bucket or you bring it to someone who does know what they're doing. But you can always learn a thing or two opening it up. Yeah. Totally. If it's already broken Yeah. That that's a gonna do that. Break it more? Start. Yeah. Right. Exactly. What are you gonna do to break it more? Well, kinda. Yeah. But Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's frequently me. Yeah. This my my biggest thing is I lose patience when things don't open. You know, like, you have, like, those, like, plastic connectors sometimes. I'm like the king of being like, raw. Just like Oh my god. Poking it open and then regretting it. Can I tell you the other day?

That is fine. I have one of those too. They roll if you're out there and you're wondering if this is something that's good for you. I got Wes on Amazon Prime Day for super cheap, and it's held up. It's been really nice.

On your thing about springs, Wes, springs are the worst.

Opening video game controllers or anything like that, yeah, I'll never get those back together.

That that would actually be funny if computers had springs inside of them. That would make me not want to open them.

Next one is habit number 7, you have fun with what you do.

I have fun solving problems. We've talked about that already several times in this episode. I really do have fun looking at a tangled mess of wires, pulling them out 1 by 1, rewiring them all, having it look pretty when I'm done with it, leaving comments, not necessarily writing tests, but I have fun doing these these things that are, I don't know. Other people might look at a wall of code and say, man, that looks daunting or that looks boring maybe.

But for me, I have so much joy out of solving the problems. The code is, you know, supplementary to that. My my joy comes from getting and creating things, having the freedom, the ability to just create.

And to me, having that joy really pushes me through being able to do so many things that I don't get joy from. I'm building a video recording app. There is not a lot of joy in some of the minutiae of these APIs.

But when I actually got a 10 second video recorded Yeah. I was like, alright. I did it. That's cool. I got something out of this. And we hear this from from Randy all the time, our producer, Wes is really cool that you guys can just make you know, you you come up with an idea, and you just say, hey. I can make this. Make it. Yeah. And that's where the joy for me comes in.

Yeah. If I were to to look at many of the things that I've done for fun that have ended up being really great learning experiences, If I would have taken a second to say, when would you actually use that? I would have not done most of them. And I would have not I would have missed out on a lot of, like, valuable insight that I gained whether or not that valuable insight, you know, made me a better develop I mean, I would say it it did definitively. But, like, I think you do miss out on on quite a bit by not just following that joy.

Yeah. You don't want to get there. That's firmly in burnout mode.

And what the way I like to think about this JS, like, you know, there's, like, some video games, like, even, like, kind of cheesy, goofy ones where, you know, like a Mario Party minigame or something where you hit the gas button.

But the reason why you don't just hold the gas button the whole time is because maybe there's, like, an engine temperature or something like that. And and that will that will get past the limit, and then you'll spin out and everybody will pass you. Like that to me feels like a major metaphor for burnout in web development or any kind of career whatsoever.

Yeah. You can hold down the throttle as long as you want, but it will potentially over overload your engine at some point and you're gonna spin out. And who knows if you're ever gonna get back up to speed, you're just gonna be waiting. Right? So, honestly, I I think that work life balance is a huge one. You know, one thing for me is that I make time for physical activity almost every day. I work out, like, 6 days a week. I make time for family 5 o'clock. Computer shut off, closes my computer, and I don't reopen it typically until the kids are asleep if I reopen it at all. I I feel like these things are just very important to keep yourself in maintenance for working for longer.

And and it's not like, oh, you can get more accomplished and blah, blah, blah. But like I said, I find joy in this stuff.

And I think that is a superpower having joy in this stuff. And if you lose that joy, if you lose that motivation to work on things, then, you know, it's hard to get that back. You have to then put in the effort to find ways to reclaim that. So for me personally, if you understand work life balance, you can understand when you're getting overloaded or what you can do to decrease that overload from the get go. Not something that you're trying to do after you're already burnt out, but from the get go. I think you're gonna set yourself up much for much greater success.

Number 9. Habit number 9. You are empathetic to your coworkers and users.

Guess what? Every single person in this world has got something going on. You Node? Everybody's got stuff going on. We're all busy. We all have, negative things. We all have positive things. We all got crazy, hectic things, schedule things, whatever.

Everybody's got something, so keep that in mind. Wes somebody leaves you a rude tweet or somebody sends you an email or something, maybe they're stressed out. Maybe they just had some instance of something happened in their life and they're taking it out on you. So you could you could take it back out on them or you can maybe think about, hey. This person is being a jackass. I wonder why that is. Hurt people hurt. Hurt people hurt, Wes. That's so true. And you know what? Like, I think, you know, there there can be 1 thing from a drive a drive by, you know, f u on a a YouTube comment or something. But it's different when it comes to the people, 1, you're trying to support, your users. Right? Those are are are your users, the people using your thing. If they're having a hard time with it, they're frustrated, remember that, hey. That's kinda your fault.

It it's important to know that, like, their frustration, whether or not it's influenced from the outside or whatever, you are kind of responsible for making sure that they have a a good experience. So understanding and putting yourself in your user shoes, that can come from, like, dogfooding your applications. Using your applications is a good way to gain empathy for your users. If you use your application and it sucks, guess what? Your users think it sucks as well.

Another one for your coworkers, these are the people that are gonna support you beyond this project, beyond the next project. So you want your coworkers and you to understand that, like, everybody's got each other's back, and we all know that we all got stuff going on. So, again, make sure that you have your coworkers back and you understand them and you understand what their motivations are, and you work to succeed in that.

software. I don't know. We just did we just did an episode on Pocket Base, and it's a joy to use. The UI is great. Everything works. It's super smooth, and it it there's no, like, pain points for me. So that's, like, a big one, especially since we just talked about it. I would say probably, like, Svelte is there. Yes.

Yeah. And you know what? The skill issue thing can be funny when it is, like, said tongue in cheek.

But when it's not said tongue in cheek, man, I don't get what you're trying to accomplish there. It it you're just trying to be a jerk, and I'm not I'm not down with that. So yeah.

Yeah. Attention to detail. I think every every major project that I know that succeeds with the, I guess, Amazon. I was gonna say with the exception of Amazon. Amazon has attention to detail, but they just prioritize different details than what I care about.

But attention to detail is one of the reasons why Apple is a gazillion dollar company and one of the reasons why applications like SvelteKit work so well. They've paid attention to the things that you gotta do. They pay attention to the small little things, and it works really well. Again, I just talked about pocket Bos a 2nd ago, but there's a a huge attention to detail there. In the UI, the UI design, there's a lot of, considerations applied to anything where you should look for things. Things are just in the place that you're expecting it. So care.

Care and have attention to what you're working on and Mhmm. Really care about it. You Node, my my brain has a hard time with this one. I'm gonna be honest because my my particular version of how my brain works is just get stuff out. And when I was a musician, I had a lot of musicians for I mean, I'm still a musician, but when I was an actively recording musician, I had a lot of friends who would work on a song for months. It's 1 song. They would work on it for months. They would agonize over every little hit, every envelope, whatever.

I would I'm, like, definitely more of a, I'll record 30 songs and then pick the one that's the least worse. That's always been my strategy.

So attention to detail is hard for me, but I think it really matters.

Yeah. Wasn't Amazon weren't they one of the first ones, if not the first one, to understand that in a drop down menu, your mouse path always is in, you know, in the direction. So they built the the triangle so that your mouse could go in a more direct path without closing the hover navigation.

So, like, they care about details.

They they just don't care about design details. Yes. It's like yeah.

Last one here, habit 11, you are part of the Sanity, and community can be all kinds of things. It can be your local community. I think I did become a much better developer when I started attending the Southeast Michigan JavaScript meetup. It was like we had 1 JavaScript meetup at that time. It was for all of Southeast Michigan.

So, like, when I started being a part of that, I started being around my people. Right? You're around your people. Everybody's, like, talking JavaScript, and they're excited about it or they're interested about it. They're trying new things.

They're they're just you know, they're there because they care.

And being around your people, regardless of if it's an in person thing or Slack channel or Discord channel, can really make a huge impact on just how you one feel about yourself. But it can it can put people in a place of, like, oh, these people are doing this cool stuff. I bet I could do this cool stuff. We're in the same kind of position here, And it gives you people to bounce ideas off of it. It gives you inspiration.

Being a part of a community is just endlessly endlessly advantageous for your career. And it's hard. I get it. If you're an introvert type of person, you might not always want to show up to this stuff and talk to the people,

Yeah. Conference is one of those things that, again, if you can force yourself to just walk into a circle of people and just introduce yourself or whatever, man, you can get so much out of that, even just talking about non tech related stuff. So I I do definitely think being a part of a community is just a great thing for so many reasons, even as an introvert.

Cool. So that was 11 habits of highly effective developers.

Which of these habits are your best habit? Which of these things, do you succeed in really Wes? And which of these do you not succeed in? What are some habits that you cultivate in your life that lead you to becoming a better developer? We wanna know all these things. Head on over to youtube.comforward/atsyntaxfm.

Leave a comment on this video of any of that stuff. We want to hear from you. Be a part of the community.

It is very funny. I replied from my personal YouTube account to a comment on one of our videos recently, and someone said, oh, hey. It's you, Scott. I was thinking that I was just talking to somebody in the community. Hey. You are. I'm in the community. We're all part of this community. We are the community.

My my top habit my top habit is my golden retriever excitement for curiosity and new things.

If there's one thing that could lead to happiness. Number 2? That is number 2. You're curious and always learning. I am I you know, I can get distracted.

I can, you know, lose track of some of the bigger details.

You know? I solve problems really well. Yes. I occasionally do not ask for help occasionally.

But the one thing that I definitely do do is that I'm always super curious about things, why they work. I'm diving into trying to figure out solutions even if they've already been solved before because I wanna see what my brain can come up with. Maybe it's something different than what other people you know? I think I'm the I'm the same habit number 2 or a problem solver mentality, but I think highly Sanity number 2 as well.

Yeah. Well, that that's good. That's probably good for this podcast.

Yes. And if you are an adventurous adult, they can hold your weight. I I try to do that. It really slinks down for us because it's it's high up when I get on it. It really, you know, pulls it down. But let me tell you, I've completed that course. I've completed that course several times.

My kids can't get past, like, the 6th object, and guess what? I got all of them.

Yes. I want to get more attachments for mine. I got mine at Costco. So this is the type of thing you can get at Costco or Amazon anywhere. But it JS. Your kids will use it for hours and hours and hours. They will, go nuts on it. And, all you need is a couple of trees.

My sick pick is going to be these little solar lanterns.

You know, like many other people, I have really loved having LEDs in my backyard for the fairy lights, drop down lights, whatever.

Courtney bought these things that Yarn, like, essentially like a glass ball with a solar panel, with a rechargeable battery that's hooked up to an LED kind of fairy TypeScript.

And they don't need much light. I'll tell you that because we have a lot of trees. They they still do just fine. We hung maybe about, I don't know, 8 of these on trees around our backyard. That's cool. And it is just so nice. We leave them out all winter.

They're fine. We don't even pnpm given time. We were just outside on the patio hanging out in our backyard the other night, and all the little fairy lights come on. And you're like, I feel like I'm in a, gosh darn, you know, fairy forest here. I feel like, there's that Yarn in Zelda where you're in a a forest with all the stuff illuminated. I felt like that. It's pretty cool. So, yeah, they're cheap. $33 for a pack a pack of 2. Well, I guess that's not that cheap, but they're nice. They're glass. They're heavy. They're, you know, the last. And like I said, we leave them out all winter long and, just a really, really nice little thing.

they call it. Scaping. That's cool. Nightscaping.

Oh, that's a fancy word. For putting lights in your backyard.

I I gotta do the front yard for us. Our our backyard has has been nightscaped. I gotta do the front yard. Wes. Let me know. I, I figured it all out. So it's it's relatively easy to do. It's all low voltage, so it's not too scary. I was gonna say Wes already have the wire for the backyard, like, laid, and all I gotta do is tap that, run it to the front yard, and connect it to the same timer. So it shouldn't be that hard. There you go. Famous last words. Alright. Shameless plugs. I'm gonna shamelessly plug the Syntax YouTube channel. We've mentioned it a couple times in this episode, but we are doing big things on the Syntax YouTube channel. CJ just did a video on Drizzle. He did a video on Coolify, self hosting, and he's just really, really amazing. Not only that, but we have the video podcast on here where Wes and I, you can see us. And, you know, we just recorded an episode with pocket Bos at the time of recording this, and we showed code, folks. We're showing code.

So if you wanna see code, you wanna see some stuff, head on over to youtube.comforward/atsyntaxfm, and you can see what we look like. You can stop confusing the 2 of us. Wicked.