A lot of time this question pops up in our mind How to become a good developer?. I am not writing a complete step-by-step guide to become a good developer but there are certain traits that I found in good developers and I would like to share them. So here it is based on my experiences.
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They know what they are doing- Every change made to source code is made for a reason. They avoid any irrelevant additions to the codebase.
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They follow official documentation- Official documentation of languages, frameworks, libraries etc. is followed before moving on to sites like StackOverflow, YouTube etc.
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They follow coding style and design patterns- For every language or framework used a set coding style and design pattern is followed.
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They write tests- Test suites are used and tests are written for the code so that errors can easily be encountered in the code if anything breaks.
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They comment their code well- Often the comments are larger than the code itself.
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They create a proper documentation- For every feature addition, the documentation is also updated immediately.
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They know how to act on error messages- For every error encountered the traceback or error is read properly to find the reason for it.
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They know how to Google- Proper search terms lead to proper solutions.
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They are enthusiastic- Without this development would be a pain.
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They have good communication skills- Like in every field involving people, communication is crucial for development.
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They are helpful and friendly- They try to help people working on other issues and features and are also friendly.
Coming back to my GSoC project-
Last week my pull request that adds the test for the dashboard script got merged. We have also zipped the data being used for test. Currently my pull request that adds the dashboard is under review.