9 Bulletproof Ways to Become a Better Developer

Are you a good developer and seeking to become a better one?

So you are already a good developer, and you perform good at your work. But you started feeling that you need to be a better developer and improve in your career.

Let me tell you something, having realized this need you have just started your journey to the mountain of great developers.

Being just a good developer should never be enough for you, you always need to be a better developer, and in a better developer I mean a great developer.

You need to be that person who has a plethora of knowledge about their field of expertise, who can make the correct technical decisions and think in an architectural way, who can write less code and have the least possible bugs in the code, who can write code once and it will work fine on all environments with different scenarios, not that guy who keeps saying '... but it works on my machine', a person who can support and help other colleagues with troubleshooting and fixing errors, and guiding them through the best development methodologies.

To be realistic, no one can become a better or a great developer overnight, this requires a huge amount of continuous and unflinching determination, consistency and hard-work.

The key element in here is dedication; That's it, you need to be dedicated to reach your final destination, as the road to success is filled with blocks, obstacles, bumps and many other impediments.

If you really need to stand out from the crowd of good or even better developers, you need to work for it and never give up achieving your ultimate goal. And believe me it will consequently pay off in an amazing way in your career, your financial situation as well as on the personal level.

Continuous Learning, Helping others, Staying up-to-date with technology, Seeking help, attending sessions are few of the essential things that you must do to significantly boost your software development career.

In this article, I will be digging in-depth with you 9 bulletproof ways to become a better developer.

1. Read and Watch Tons of Tutorials Consistently

You can never become a better developer if you do not learn and educate yourself and it should be in a consistent manner.

What you've learned in university was only the basics and the fundamentals of software development. That's not enough, the field of software development is rapidly evolving and you need to keep your knowledge updated and in sync with the latest changes on languages, frameworks, tools and other stuff. That's it; the more you learn, the more you have knowledge and the better you will become in software development.

Let's take a real example to clarify this point; Let's say you have a task that requires to develop a sign up web form where the details will be saved into a mysql database and then send a verification email to the user with a link to verify his account.

Now at a first glimpse, this task requires you to know different development frameworks and tools, If you do not know html, some javascript (to do client-side validation), css (to style the sign up form), some server-side scripting language, like php or Asp.Net to validate and store the sign up form details and then generate an email and send it the user's provided email address, then how would you be able to develop such feature?

You might simply say "...well, I will simply google 'how to build a sign up form' and get numerous of stackoverflow and other blogs and tutorials where I can easily copy/paste".

Ok, well, let me tell you something, this might do the required task, and it might solve your problem (to some level). But is it going to make you a good developer? No, I say it will make you a good copy-paster! and believe me you will face big troubles in your career and self-development if you stay a good copy-paster.

So it is up to you if you want to remain a good copy-paster or become a great developer.

Stackoverflow is there to help people solve specific issues or errors and tutorial sites or blogs are there to help people learn and get educated on some topics, these are not there to provide you with full solutions to all your problems.

You will need to learn the involved languages and frameworks you are using, to build the knowledge base and be able to build advanced and complicated features (you will not have a copy-paste solutions for more advanced or complicated features, I can assure you that nobody from stackoverflow or any other community websites will give you copy-paste solutions for free!)

My point here is that you need to learn to be a better developer. You need to read and watch tutorials and try them by yourself, this way you can amplify your knowledge and get the hands-on experience while trying those tutorials.

W3Schools is one of the oldest yet still up-to-date tutorials website for web development. In my opinion it is the best way to start learning web development.

TutorialsPoint is another example of a great software development educational website with hundreds of written and watchable tutorials.

You can also watch videos on YouTube. There are tons of software development educational videos there. Just search for whatever topic you are interested in, and you will get thousands of videos.

Bottom-line, the internet is full of educational resources including articles, ebooks, books that you can order, tutorials and articles, simply google whatever topic you want to learn and there you go.

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