“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

–Aristotle

We all think and wait for one huge event in our life that would completely change our life, we all crave for that overnight success . But guess what, we are all wrong.

It’s not one great event, but our small habits which we ignore everyday, that makes the difference. The habits decide where that person will be in 5 years time.

Habits are crucial at deciding the success of a person. If you are aspiring to get that dream job, or grow in your career, you have to work on your habits the most.

We have very successful programmers with some great habits, and are cruising through the success ladder in life. But also we have some, who are struggling with bad habits that are destructive in nature, and hinder their growth.

Therefore, we have compiled a list of the habits that you can embed in your daily routine and increase the growth progress.

1. Exercise

Some of the most successful people wake up early to exercise first thing in the morning.

–Laura Vanderkam

It is an actual thing that programmers are the ones that do the least amount of physical exercise.

Therefore they are the ones that need to do it the most. Exercising has a positive impact not only on your overall health, but also on your productivity.

Moderate to intense exercise leads to improved concentration, better memory retention, extended mental stamina, boosted creativity, quickened learning, and lower stress.

And the worst part of not exercising is the downward trending health of programmers. I have seen some of my best and favourite developers and programmers going down the road of health just because they ignore their health.

You don’t have to become a fitness freak. Just a 30 min walk with stretches is good as a start if you are not doing any exercise at all. When you look at the long term, the benefits of working out for just 30 minutes are enormous. Slowly, you can also start adding up stretches, cardio and strengthening exercises.

2. Keeping Up With Trends

The world of technology changes at a crazy rapid rate. A new framework or library is released every single day, therefore it is crucial to keep learning continuously.

After completing the computer science degree, or getting hired for your job, your learning should not stop, doing so will get you outdated within just a few months of time.

Keep learning various languages, tools, frameworks, programming techniques, and keep improving your overall coding quality.

Something new is released every day, better and faster ways of doing things are being developed. Failing to keep up with changing trends will lead to being uncompetitive.

There is an easy and simple solution to stay up to date with the latest technology. You just need to take out 30 minutes everyday and dedicate it to researching and learning what is new in the market.

3. Time Management

Learning the latest tech stacks and coding principles is not enough. Time management is equally crucial. The overall productivity of the project you are working on depends upon this skill.

Whether you are able to complete the project in the given time frame or not depends on your time management skill.

Programmers have a lot on their plate, they must deal with all the complex problems that they face, learn new technologies, and if one is a freelancer then, they have even more things to do, for eg conversation with clients, outsourcing etc.

And even if you believe that you have really good time management skills, there is always room for improvement, and these changes will make a big difference on your overall productivity.

4. Projects

Once you have learned the basics of if-else and loops of programming, you must quickly bring all that into practice, and that is where projects come in.

Before you can get a client, or go for a job interview, you must work on your personal projects. Doing projects will only allow you to build confidence, and know what skill you need to polish.

The other benefit of doing a project is that you will have personal attachment, therefore you will go in and out to complete it, add new features to it, and all that effort will be pure pleasure.

How cool would it be to make your first web scraper to scrap your website, or make your own music player, add functionalities, and design the looks and of it as your heart desires.

5. High Quality Coding

“Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand,” 

–Martin Fowler

Anyone could code, but what really distinguished one from another is the quality of code. To differentiate yourself from other programmers, your code must be clean, easy to understand, easy to maintain and extend.

Successful developers take the time and effort to write better codes. They try to learn and follow the best practices, implement robust design patterns and versatile architecture.

This makes their code manageable and easy to edit. Their codebase is easily extendable whenever new features are developed and integrated.

If the scale of the project is small, one would not find it important to write clean code, and follow the best principles for programming.

But as soon as your project starts scaling, or if you get hired to work at a company, where you will be given a million lines of codebase, adhering to coding principles is a life and death like situation for companies.

If the code is not written with the highest quality, it would cost time and lots of resources for the company. A single employee’s carelessness would take the company months back.

6. Discipline

Motivation gets you started, but it takes discipline to stick to your path and really achieve your goals.

You might get motivated to start learning a new language or framework, but you would hit a deadlock as soon as the going gets tough, when the difficulty of problems quickly transitions from easy to difficult. And this is where you need discipline by your side to keep progressing.

Learning to program is really hard, and it takes time. Therefore you will need to not just have the initial motivation but also the discipline to reach the final goal.

Apart from learning, even during the job interview, discipline is something that is valued highly by employers.

7. Social Networking

Staying active on regular social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram is important, but it is crucial to stay active on platforms specifically made for developers. Some of the popular developer oriented social media apps are Github, StackOverflow.

These apps are dedicated for developers, that help to connect with other developers around the world, make friends and form communities.

Being part of a community has lots of perks, for example, you can have somebody that can check your code, provide feedback on your code, get awareness about the latest advancements in technology.

Whenever you get stuck on something, you can get help from other fellow developers. Apart from that, other developers can check your code and provide valuable feedback to improve the overall quality of your code.

Connecting with other developers also opens lots of job opportunities, for eg a developer working at a particular company, that company might need an ios developer urgently, if you are connected, you could be a potential employee for that job.

Conclusion

Habits play a crucial role in deciding the success of anybody, therefore it is unarguably something you must work on and better yourself.

In this post we looked at some of the best habits of successful developers, which you can follow to become an elite developer or programmer.

With that comes the end of the article, thank you for sticking till the end.