In our fast-paced ecosystem, we tend to spend our time trying out the latest inventions, then arguing about them on the internet.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do that. But we should probably slow down a bit and take a look at the things that don’t change all that much. Not only will this improve the quality of our work and the value we deliver — it will actually help us learn these new tools faster.
This post is a mix of my experience and my wishes for the New Year. And I want to hear your suggestions in the comments just as much as I want to share my own.
Learn how to write readable code
Most of our work lies not in writing new code, but maintaining existing code. That means you end up reading code much more often then writing it, so you need to optimize your code for the next programmer, not for the interpreter.
I recommend reading these three amazing books — in this order, from shortest to longest:
- The Art of Readable Code by Dustin Boswell
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship by Robert C. Martin
- Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction by Steve McConnell
Learn how to write for humans
A big portion of communication with our colleagues and other people are textual: task descriptions and comments, code comments, Git commits, chat messages, emails, tweets, blog posts, etc.
Imagine how much time people spend reading and understanding all that. If you can reduce this time by writing more clearly and concisely, the world will be a better place to work.
- On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction by William Zinsser.
- The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White.
- Orwell’s rules on writing.
- In Russian: awesome Glavred course.
Learn the old computer science wisdom
Front-end development isn’t just animated dropdown menus any more. It’s more complicated than ever before. Part of that notorious “JavaScript fatigue” stems from the increased complexity of the tasks we have to solve.
This, however, means that it’s time to learn from all wisdom that non-front-end developers have built up over the decades. And this is where I want to hear your recommendations the most.
Here are a couple resources I personally would recommend on this:
- Learn To Think Like A Computer Scientist course at Coursera.
- The five programming books that meant most to me by DHH
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Thanks to Henrique Alves, Nicolás Bevacqua, Alexander Burtsev, Nataliya Karatkova, Oliver Turner, Juho Vepsäläinen and Anton Zhiyanov for feedback and suggestions. If you like photos in this post, download them from my Unsplash account. And follow me on Twitter if you like this article.