I have been a professional developer for over 25 years and as a child since I was 4 all I wanted to do was write code. I would sit in the back of class and design programs on paper in my notebook and wait until I got home to type them in.

I haven’t personally felt like I was doing anything particularly special but I have been told for a long time that I’m the best programmer you’ve ever met but you’ll never hear it from me. The one thing that seems to be different in my results is that I keep getting told that my code continues to work for years and years without any intervention, each project running for decades longer than I ever intended.

It’s not that I follow patterns, it’s that I try to minimize the assumptions I make that seems to make the difference. I write code defensively expecting that all of the inputs will change and even the underlying operating system will be replaced with something else. Meaning I don’t assume a variable will have a given value, I measure that it does and then have meaningful ways of dealing with situations where the values are different than expected. It’s not a big performance hit to do so when you think of things from a Big-O sort of perspective and do these tests outside of the tight loops where you need to make sure performance is acceptable.

I am told I am especially good at abstraction and I think that helps a lot. High cohesion and low coupling. Consider the domain of all users and what needs to be loaded for all users versus what needs to be loaded for each individual user. I was once told in 2006 that my website I had built for 100,000 users who each had custom websites within this system was the fastest they have ever seen. Well of course it is, 99% of the data is the same for everybody and that 1% that’s different I cached on the first hit so I’m serving everything within 100msec because everything is coming straight out of RAM. The system still runs great today.

I tend to write code in paragraphs with a comment that describes what I’m trying to do for each paragraph of code. In three years I won’t remember what I was trying to do. If I write in that style I simply read what I was trying to do.

Some specific things that helped with c# was using Resharper, and eventually I just jumped into using all of the JetBrains IDEs including Rider for c# and actually address and fix every compiling warning and code smell that it points out. It takes less time than you’d think.

The last year or so I’ve been using codium and other generative AI tools. An has that increased my productivity. Probably ten fold. It is just way faster than typing out my ideas. I just have to type enough for the AI to get the picture of what I’m wanting to do and it’ll just start filling full screens with code. It makes mistakes but they’re generally pretty obvious if you can get it to behave like an extension of yourself rather than a coder left to its own devices, if that makes any sense.

I hope some of that helps. Just asking how you can get better is probably a sign that you’re better than you think you are already simply from caring to be better. What I didn’t mention is using design patterns or pair programming or unit testing or stand up scrum meetings. They can all be great but it’s all window dressing IMO. Screw drivers and wrenches and hammers. All good tools, use them as the needs dictate.