Developers are always busy. There’re always things that come up like bugs and new features that we have to spend working on.
In this article, we’ll look at all the useless ways that we can spend our time as developers.
Social Media
A lot of social media is a big time sink. There’re always cat and dog pictures, and pictures of people going on vacation that we can stare at for a long time.
They don’t help us too much, and looking at photos of people on the beach while we’re working is downright depressing.
Therefore, we should get off social media and finish our work so that we can go on vacation ourselves.
Long and Useless Meetings
Many meetings that we’re asked to attend are long and useless. However, we’re stuck with it since somebody with power asked us to attend.
These are definitely productivity killers and the time we spend in these long and useless are times that we’ll never get back.
We should keep our meetings short and only attend the ones that we need to attend.
If they’re long and aren’t that useful, or if we have nothing useful to contribute, then find a way to get out. Most people are happier than we’re delivering things that sitting around doing nothing in useless meetings.
The shorter they’re the better.
Reinventing the Wheel
If there’re off-the-shelf solutions for whatever we’re doing, then we should use that.
There’re many libraries and frameworks in the world and they can probably do whatever we need already.
For instance, we probably shouldn’t be implementing our own lists or sorting algorithms for example.
A good sorting algorithm like quicksort takes specialized knowledge to implement properly, so we should probably leave it to the experts to implement it and then use their solutions.
Likewise, most data structures that we need have already been implemented by other people so we can just use them if needed.
This also goes for anything that has existing code written for it. Time-tested code is better than new code that hasn’t been tested for bugs.
We can implement something that we have implemented before from scratch to understand them more. But if we’re doing something for work, then we probably should just use existing solutions.
Fixing Spaghetti Code
Spaghetti code is bad because we don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a complete chaos and probably too complex and messy for us to comprehend.
If we have to deal with spaghetti code, then they probably just going to make our brains fry.
That’s not good at all since we can better use that time to implement new features to help customers or we can help other people that are stuck or behind on their work.
Therefore, if we have to deal with spaghetti code, we should replace them with new clean code, or find another place or team that doesn’t have spaghetti code in their codebase because this is bad code that tortures people’s brains.
Not Asking For Help When Stuck on a Problem
When we’re stuck for a while, we should ask for help. More likely, than not, someone can get us in the right direction.
Therefore, instead of trying things to get unstuck ourselves, we should find other people that can help us get unstuck faster.
Premature Optimization
If we don’t need to optimize something now, then don’t do it. We know that we don’t need it if we don’t run into problems in our own performance tests.
We can leave that stuff for later. However, it’s important to make our code easy to change so that we can do any optimizations that are needed when required.
Perfectionism
There’s no such thing as something that’s perfect. Therefore, striving for perfectionism isn’t a very good goal.
All we need is a good solution that works for our users. Of course, we should still think of the use cases that users go through when they use our app, but we don’t need to be obsessed with perfectionism.
We need to deliver our stuff and that’s much more important than writing perfect code.
Conclusion
Long and useless meetings don’t do us any good. It’s time that we can use to deliver things. Instead, make them short and useful or skip them.
Social media can be a big time-sink. We shouldn’t look at them if we have work to do.
Spaghetti code should be thrown out and replaced with some clean code. They’re just too hard to work.
Also, we should stay stuck on anything, including perfectionism.
Once they’re all eliminated, we’ll have free time to enjoy ourselves.
