The following views were expressed by a member of ourCodacy Community

Before I came to the industry side of the world, I was an academic. I was focused on computer science research (with a special love for software quality) and on teaching students at the university.

From my years in academia, I was able to determine patterns in students when they were writing code. I saw the same patterns from junior to senior developers at different companies. Some of those patterns might be hindering your performance, so let’s take a look at what not to do as a developer:

• Jumping into programming right away. Before writing your first lines of code, think about the problem and the proper solution. It might help brainstorm on a piece of paper!

• Not updating your knowledge. Programming languages, frameworks, technologies, and techniques change every day. So you need to keep yourself updated and never stop learning.

• Forgetting edge cases. Even if your code seems to be working and you added some tests, don’t forget to check for edge cases. It depends on the solution you are working on, but it might be negative numbers, empty strings, different input types, and everything else in between.

• Not checking performance and complexity. Most of the time, there are better and simpler ways to go about a particular solution and piece of code. So always check the complexity of your code and if you can improve it. I discussed the Big-O notation in a previous post, so give it a read.

• Not reviewing your code. Always review your code, both manually and automatically. With code reviews, your team can find issues early on, share knowledge, distribute ownership, and standardize development practices, among many other benefits. Plus, static code analysis tools like Codacy Quality can effectively reduce heavy lifting and tedious parts of the code review process.

Free to share other things developers should not do 👇