#programming

My inner circle of friends is mostly composed of developers, and we always talk about what separates so-called senior developers from actual senior developers. In my opinion, it boils down to professionalism versus wishful thinking.

There’s always pressure from the Agile flavour your company has chosen to use to show where you are, what’s missing, and how we (the team) can unblock you to complete your tasks. If you haven’t finished your task, don’t lie about it (not even to yourself) – this leads to tech debt that you or your teammates will have to finish and stress about later. If you want to maintain control of the situation and things slip out of control, finish the code you started writing.

Nowadays, this is quite easy to implement; we have many tools to enforce how written code can be read. Nobody likes a discussion about when to use curly braces or lingering commas at the end of the JavaScript code base. Use prettier, use eslint, use the tools available, and automate all of this work right now.

One of the things that I have vocalised to myself after reading this article from Dan Lew with the same name, is that I have stopped this behaviour by my own without noticing it. Like the article states, it has made me happier to do so.

Let me explain my point of view on why I believe this is the natural progression of every senior developer in a company and my reasons behind proposing more adoption of tools like standardJS on your workflows.

Code is opinionated, we all have our own personal biases and our own way of writing that comes baked in with our personalities, what is easy to understand and write for me might not be so easy for the person in front of me.