5 Biggest Developer Mistakes You Are Making That Waste Your Time

in this video I'm gonna share with you the five things developers do that they think is making them a better more professional developer but are really just slowing them down and wasting their time and after you're done with this video make sure you leave down in the comments below which one of these five mistakes you see yourself making but before we get started I want to tell you about today's video sponsor code Jim which is the best place to go for learning Java because of their game of fight approach which not only makes learning enjoyable but also helps you retain the knowledge that you're learning on top of that they have an incredible community that you can utilize whenever you get stuck or have questions so that's a great resource to have on top of that this learning is not just about reading lectures and watching lectures but instead you're gonna be actively writing code and practicing your skills which is by far the best way to learn so if you're interested at all about learning Java make sure you use the link down below to check out code Jim welcome back to web does simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner so if that sounds interesting make sure you subscribe to the channel for more videos just like this now before I get started in this list I want to say that there's probably some things that I'm gonna mention that you are going to disagree with or take offense to because you may do these and think that they make you a better developer I am not directly calling anyone out with this and if you disagree feel free to let me know down in the comments below these are purely just my own opinions based on my own experiences and the experiences of other people that I've seen so jumping into number one which I guarantee is going to be the most controversial and that is you are spending too much time customizing your editor your terminal or your development environment as a whole and the reason I say this is because so many people get deep into the weeds of customizing every single little piece of their development environment to make every little macro in every little color exactly how they want it to be when in reality it's almost a way of procrastinating from actually developing code and doing your own job as a developer now that's not to say it's a bad idea to customize your editor or terminal at all but you go over the top and start doing all of these crazy things and making your own custom theme and making your own custom macros a lot of times you're actually just wasting time because it takes you a long time to do that and you really don't get much benefit from it it's really not saving you much time what I recommend is just to find a theme that's already available download that and use that and then download a few extensions that make your life easier for example maybe an extension that you know builds get into your own workflow is going to be useful because you use git every single day so having that built into your editor is going to make you faster as a developer but you know a lot of these extensions and plugins and customizations that people do especially when you get to you know vim and Emacs it's going to be so much work to customize this workflow to exactly how you want it and in the end you probably aren't getting much additional benefit so in the end you're wasting a lot of time on this customization and I know it's okay to customize your editor if you do it purely for the enjoyment factor I know a lot of people enjoy customizing the editor you're getting the exact right color thing and they find it enjoyable but if your reason for customizing your editor is for productivity and performance gains generally you're going to be better off just leaving it pretty bare-bones and just working with what you have and when you start to run into problems slowly introducing things that are going to fix those problems for you and speaking of slowly introducing changes as you go something else that I see a lot of people run into as a problem is that they over architect the code when they're developing it imagine you need to make a really simple drag-and-drop a list which is going to sort one single list on a webpage well that's a fairly you know difficult task but it's definitely doable and you can get it done fairly quickly but what if you want to you know make sure that this drag and drop list supports dragging various different elements from other lists from other web pages maybe you want to drag files and maybe you want to do all these additional things well if it's not in the requirements for the actual thing that you need to build why are you thinking about all of these different concepts and building them all into your project when in reality this drag and drop list is going to be used once it's really just made to sort things and you're over-engineering this into a crazy drag-and-drop library that does all of these different drag-and-drop sorting features that you don't actually need this is a huge problem I see all the time people think well what if well what if well what if when in reality all these what-ifs probably aren't really going to happen and you're spending days or even weeks working on all of these what-ifs when you could have had that feature built and shipped a long time ago so I highly recommend you don't over engineer a product that you're working on make sure you think through the edge cases and think through the use case of it but don't think about what ifs in the future don't think about making the API exactly perfect so that it's going to be integrated into anything seamlessly because the more general and more architect did you make your code in that vein generally the harder it is to write that code and it's going to take you a lot longer to get done with these features when you should just be focusing on getting the feature out and making sure it works flawlessly with the specific use case in mind that you have because you probably will not actually run into all of these what-if news cases you're thinking of and all that extra time and effort is just wasted because that code is never going to be used now similar to the idea of over-engineering something else I see developers do is over optimize their code they start thinking about every single minor performance optimization down to you know single bits of memory that they're trying to save and it's taking them hours and weeks and days of time just to get these little tiny performance gains out of whatever they're building when in reality you don't actually need those performance gains 99.9% of the stuff that you work on is not going to be so performance centric that you need to focus on the single bit or single byte changes that are going to give you you know 0.1% better performance now if you can easily double the performance of something with not many changes that obviously do it but if it's going to take you hours of work to get 1% more performance in something that's already performing just fine why do it why waste all of your time making those performance gains because really all you're doing is making it so the numbers look better and it looks faster it can do a million operations per second but if your maximum use case is 100 operations a second why does it need to perform at 1 million operations a second there's no point in wasting your time getting to that level optimization the only time you should worry about optimization and performance is if you have an optimization or performance problem then you know exactly what parts of the code need to be optimized because they're the ones slowing you down so you can focus your efforts specifically on the pieces of code that need these changes and not all over the codebase where 1% improvements could be made but really they don't need to be made now the next mistake that developers make is probably the one that I am the most guilty of and then is spending too much time manually testing your code a lot of times you're making a website and you make some changes and you go onto the website and test those changes make some more changes go back to the website test them and so on you kind of repeat this cycle and in the time of making your feature that you're working on you probably spent a considerable amount of time manually testing this feature in the web when if you would have just started out by making automated tests at the beginning to test these features you would save yourself a lot of time from the manual testing because you're able to just run the automatic tests which does it for you it'll immediately tell you if your changes work and you don't have to worry about going back and manually testing them yourself this is a great way to save time and not only that but these automatic tests are going to be used in the future so that you can actually make your code better for the future because these tests are going to continually run forever and something about manual testing at least that I happen to do all the time is when you work on your code long enough and start manually testing it over and over and over again by the time you get around to the 20th or 30th or 40th time you're testing this feature it gets mind-numbingly boring and you start to skip things you're like okay well it worked last time it probably works this time and every time I do that it's the one time that that thing breaks and I don't actually test it and I end up having broken code that I'm deploying or pushing somewhere and that's just a big problem so making sure that you put in automated tests instead of always manually testing is a great way for you to save yourself some time and these automated tests don't even have to be automated code tests it can even be just a system that makes your manual testing quicker and more automatic because it's something you're gonna do all the time so having a way to automate that and make it quicker is going to be a great time saver for you now this last one is again something that I find myself guilty of and I'm sure everyone does because it is just a fun thing to do and that is to reef door code to make it newer and better so for example you have a site that's built on jQuery and it doesn't really get changed that much anymore it doesn't really get used that much anymore it's just an old part of your site that uses jQuery and it works just fine well now that the rest of your site is maybe using react or you're using react on other projects and you really like it you think I'm gonna change this entire site over to using react instead of jQuery why I mean it works perfectly fine with jQuery you have no problems and it's not something that you really change or really affects any of your other code why would you go through and change it to be based on react it's not giving you any improvements really I mean maybe you'll get some performance improvements but honestly if you don't have a performance problem why bother with performance as I mentioned earlier and other than that the only real benefit is for your own personal self just saying oh it feels better to be interact when in reality it does the exact same thing and it works just fine also when you do these types of reef actors you're always opening yourself up to potential mistakes where you mess something up and now that code doesn't actually work as you would expect it to because you changed something and didn't put it into the react version and now you have bugs you're introduced and that's just a bad thing to have another example of this is when hooks came out and react a lot of people were trying to rush to change all of their class components to be hook based components when in reality the class-based components work just fine there's no difference between a class and a hook based component when you use it inside of react with other components so they didn't affect anything outside of their realm it was literally just that one single class and it worked just fine so why change it over I think this is probably the hardest of these mistakes not to make because it just is fun to make things new you want to use the latest and greatest and coolest technology and it's always exciting when a new thing comes out and you get to start using it but in reality the old stuff that's party there works just fine and your time would be better spent on building out new features using the new technology instead of making old features use the new technology as well really the only time that I see a benefit in updating old code to be based on some newer version of newer stuff is when you actually need to go back and change that old code and refactor it because of you know feature changes or something else and it's there to become a pain to use the older way of doing things then updated to the new version I think is a great idea and something that in the end will end up saving you time because if you continually need to modify that code it's probably better to have it in a newer better format and those are the five biggest time wasters I see developers make and if you made any of these let me know down in the comments which one you do the most also if you enjoyed this video check out my other videos linked over here and subscribe to the channel for more videos just like this thank you very much for watching and have a good day

Channel: Web Dev Simplified

Views: 68,822

Rating: 4.9226651 out of 5

Keywords: webdevsimplified, 5 biggest devloper time wasters, 5 developer mistakes, 5 biggest developer mistakes, developer mistakes, web dev mistakes, web dev productivity, productivity mistakes, developer productivity, developer productivity tools, developer productivity mistakes, web dev productivity mistakes, programming mistakes, programming time wasters, programming productivity, programming productivity tips, coding mistakes, coding productivity, coding productivity setup, wds, js

Id: tHKWLk-pWJA

Length: 11min 31sec (691 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 23 2020