Consistency is king in this career. Our industry rewards developers who can ship & quickly solve problems.

Let’s talk about what the best developers do every day…

(Reminder: “The Habits of Top Developers” is available with exclusive content through the end of the day. I’ve also extended the 20% off link through tonight. If you want the deep dive on daily practices, that book is for you!)

1. Get clarity

Standup is (too often) a waste of time.

But a great standup has so much potential as a forcing function. The real reason for your standup update is to bring the most important thing to the surface.

Great engineers know this, and they plan for it.

Before standup, top engineers have reviewed the list of possible things they could work on today. They’ve picked the most important problem to resolve first.

In standup, they say what that problem is and whether there are any blockers.

A great standup update is quick, because it has only the most important thing (plus whatever is standing in your way).

2. Review code

Your team is depending on you.

When you take a long time to review code, it slows everything down. Conversely, when you review code on a quick, regular cadence; everything speeds up.

Great engineers know that shorter feedback loops lead to better code.

Waiting for code review is a feedback loop. And that loop is often VERY long.

Do something about it. Keep reviews top of mind, or batch them for bulk reviewing sessions at least once per day.

3. Test, test, test

How do you know your code works? How do you develop confidence in your application?

Every day you should be testing code in some way.

Most often, that’s programmatically with unit tests. If there’s a day where you didn’t write a unit test, then that’s a red flag.

But great developers don’t stop there.

They layer their tests to include functional tests & end-to-end tests. Let the computers test themselves at every step and level of the code.

Finally, you should be manually smoke testing your code.

I know a lot of developers who believe manual testing is beneath them. That’s a mistake. There’s no better way to connect with your product than to run through the user flows yourself.

Manual testing builds a user-centric muscle common to top developers.

4. Lots of writing

I write a daily post, but that’s meager in comparison to the amount of writing I do for work.

During a normal day, most of that writing is on Slack. The communication that happens there is incredibly valuable. It’s how you collaborate and unblock your teammates.

Moreover, you should be writing some form of documentation — code comments, READMEs, API docs, internal wikis — most days that you work as a developer.

There’s such thing as too much documentation. And old documentation is hard to maintain.

But writing is something that top developers do all day most days.

5. Digging through logs/metrics

It’s surprising. You think that great developers spend a lot of time in the code.

But actually, as you advance in your career, you spend less time in the code. Usually the code changes you make are smaller, focused.

Instead, you spend a ton of time figuring out the problems and the best ways to solve them. For that, you need to spend a lot of time looking at monitoring and observability software.

Great developers look at logs, APM, CI pipelines, etc for much of the day to diagnose and monitor what’s going on with the application. Learning to use these tools is a key part of working at an elite level as a developer.

Fall in love with the logs & they’ll help you immensely.