The simple secret of AMAZING developers
How to be a better developer with better habits
There’s one thing that’s common to all successful developers.
Good habits.
Being a software developer is made up of decisions and problem-solving. For managers it’s not only making decisions for themselves, but for their team as well.
What if I told you that these people were not born good, but good habits turned them good?
Why Developers Should Care About Habits
“Habits are small, automatic actions that make up more than half of our daily behavior. “
In the fast-moving world of software development, being efficient and adaptable is crazy important. And here’s how good habits can help you with that:
Faster learning: Becoming a wizard in different tools, languages, or frameworks is easily achievable with small steps and patience.
Better workflows: Good habits help you focus on what matters and avoid decision fatigue.
Be more adaptable: Tiny changes will prepare you better to change those tiny changes to adapt to bigger changes in the tech world.
The Magic of Small Changes
Compounding growth.
You’ve probably heard that term several times. Small changes added together, consistently implemented over time, produce monumental outcomes.
And from personal experience, understanding this is a life-changer.
There are plenty of generic examples out there.
Read 10 minutes a day, finish 4,321 books a year.
Go on a 10-minute walk every day, live 48 years longer.
Invest 10% of your salary in the S&P500 and be rich in your 60s.
But I want to share with you a personal story about how a tiny habit changed my life.
I was never a bookworm. Before 2020, I didn’t read a single non-fiction book and the amount of fiction books I read can be counted on one hand.
I failed the final exam in Literature in school. On top of that, I was playing 8-12 hours a day of video games on average.
Then, in 2020, I decided to give it a go and read a non-fiction book. Why? COVID made us do crazy things 😂
That book propelled me into developing a tiny habit, in which I read a few minutes most days and listen to books whenever I do something that doesn’t require any brain power, like doing the dishes or working out.
This habit helped me with:
Realizing that there’s way more to life than video games, so I quit playing.
Investing in the stock market and made over 80% to date, after losing a lot of money on many stocks.
Becoming a full-time solopreneur to chase my dream.
Finishing 218 books to date, and reread 5. Around 55/year.
And here’s the weird thing:
I don’t enjoy reading books. Even though I finished hundreds of books, I still force myself to sit down and concentrate on reading.
But it feels almost easy to do that.
Maybe one day I’ll be like
and be able to relax and “Enjoy a good book” :)
How to build new habits
Identity-Driven habits
One way to develop new habits is the identity-driven approach, instead of the goal-driven one.
Instead of chasing some sort of outcome like "write better code," frame your habits around the kind of developer you aspire to be:
Identity: "I'm the type of developer who writes clean, maintainable code."
Habit: Commit to daily refactorings of one function.
Result: Clean coding eventually becomes second nature.
Other than goal-driven habits, which usually fade after the goal is achieved, the result with identity-driven habits is a behavior change that lasts. They become who you are.
The four stages of habit creation
Habits have a fairly predictable process:
Cue: That's the trigger to begin the behavior.
Example: You receive a Slack message in the #team-updates channel: "We’re blocked on this feature until the PR gets reviewed."
Craving: The motivation to act, in service to a reward.
Example: You crave the relief of getting it over with, or you won’t hear the end of it.
Response: The thing you do.
Example: You click on the PR link in Slack, scan the code changes, leave necessary comments or suggestions, and approve it for merging.
Reward: The reward feels good, and that's what motivates the behavior.
Example: The blocker is removed, the feature progresses, and you avoid any future nudges about the same task. You feel a sense of relief knowing you’re in the clear.
Building better habits
Make cues obvious
Good habits start with clear triggers. Create intentional prompts to start positive behaviors:
Use habit stacking: Add new habits to existing ones. For example, "After I start my morning standup, I will spend 10 minutes planning my tasks for the day."
Use reminders: Create a recurring calendar notification to review PRs at the same time every day.
Increase the desire
To motivate yourself, link the habits to positive emotions:
Pair things you need to do with things you enjoy doing. For example, listen to your music while doing code reviews of pull requests.
Reframe challenges as opportunities. Instead of fearing an annoying code review, see this as an opportunity to learn from other people's ways of solving problems.
Simplify the response
Reduce friction for good habits:
Break large tasks into smaller actions. For example, if you want to learn NextJS, you can start by reading a summary of the framework, creating a project, building a page and an API endpoint to see how it works, etc.
Apply the two-minute rule: Start with just two minutes of action. Opening a book to read one page usually leads to reading way more than that.
Maximize the reward
Celebrate small wins to reinforce habits:
Track progress visually: Maintain some kind of a board to see completed tasks. The satisfaction of moving a task to "Done" is a very strong instant gratification.
Reward yourself after completing a habit. For example, you may reward yourself with a short break after going over a PR.
Breaking Bad Habits
We all have habits that drain our productivity or kill our other good habits.
Scrolling social media, eating unhealthy food, watching Netflix etc.
And as hard as it is to stop doing these habits, there’s hope! There’s a way to make it much easier to break these habits.
Make the cue invisible: To avoid reaching the phone every now and then, physically place it away from you when you work. This works wonders.
Reduce the Craving: Remind yourself of the negative consequences. For example, use a timer tracker. Seeing that you spent 2 hours scrolling X is a good enough incentive to stop doing it. Trust me.
Increase the Effort: Add friction to the performance of the bad habits. Remove social media apps and log out from every draining platform after every use. Lately, I also removed Gmail and Chrome from my phone. The change is amazing.