How to stop being a slow developer
I have 1 YOE and I often miss my deadlines which causes spillover. The tasks assigned to me get completed by me, and I face very little difficulty in it.
Also, when someone asks me about a different part of the codebase, I am unable to answer confidently. I tried reading documentation, but couldn't figure out much. But still I do read the documentation sometimes.
I identified distractions and removed them, mostly my phone. But recently I noticed that I still miss deadlines, but the reason for that is I take a long time to figure out the issue/feature that I am going to develop.
So far I have tried
- Removing distractions, by uninstalling SM apps
- White boarding the issue beforehand
- Communicating better and early.
Things I am going to try
- Use debugger instead of logs(I know, should have done before)
- Document before implementing (Didn't know, that this was a standard practice before)
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You remind me of a Junior in my Team, hardly 1 yr experienced. I am getting frustrated with him due to this, sometimes he gets confused about very simple things. But fortunately I don’t have to deal with him on day to day basis, otherwise I would have pulled my hairs out. My suggestion- Try to understand the system, try to understand what you are working on, what that application does, what user expects, what is the actual intent. Gradually, developers have to start thinking like the applications’s user. Usually product managers do that, but developers too need to have same understanding (or better), as them. If you don’t really understand what your application does, you will keep making mistakes.
Well, if you're unsure of anything during story pointing (or estimations) then add a few buffer points (or hrs).
Everyone has to go through documentation OR ask for help whenever there's a blocker. Not everything about the system can be known by any particular individual.
I personally like to ask the team about 3 things during pointing / estimations:
- What's the complexity of the story? (Just a gut feel. If developers are confident then all good else it needs to br broken down further)
- Is there any dependency? (Can the work be done without this?)
- Do we have any unknowns? (New tech, new architecture/API/system, need to check documentation, not familiar with system, etc.)
If any of the above is high, then additional buffer is added to avoid slippage.
Get very very familiar with your IDE and tweak it to the T. Highly recommend jetBrain IDEs as they are class apart. Get as many productivity plugins as you want.
Setup the whole infra locally. Testing and developing on a stage is time consuming, if your architecture and systems allows you to run the cluster locally, do it. Will make ur life easier and u can mess around without fear.
Use monitors, keyboard shortcuts, macros etc. These things take time to develop a habit off.
Create mind map before implementing. Say trying to implement a new feature, clear a mind of how which services will be touched, what needs to be passed from where and how. Dont need to write it down, a mental model shud do.
Compartmentalise, develop small pieces, test and then plug in into bigger piece.