7 simple habits of the top 1% of engineers

Code is for humans, not just for computers.

Code is for the engineers on your team , who read, maintain, and build on top of your code.

Code is for the users , whether it’s a kid on their phone, a developer calling your API, or yourself.

tests include:

• Unit tests for individual components and isolated functions.


• Integration tests for interactions between multiple components.


• End-to-end tests that assess the entire system’s functionality from a user’s perspective

Tests should be simple. It should be easy to identify what went wrong when reading a failing test.

code was clean, organized, and logical . Each decision made in their code made sense, and when something didn’t, it was documented well within the code.

A good way to write clean code is to follow principles, like the SOLID principles. Though they were initially designed with OOP (object-oriented programming) in mind, they are extensible to general ... See more

Detach from the code itself

Amazing engineers stay unattached to the code itself.

They were unafraid to delete and start over on code, even if they were 90% of the way in, if it meant that the end result would be better overall.

Code isn’t personal, so feedback was taken with stride.

Code isn’t perfect. Nobody cares about perfect code. They care abo... See more

Coding is a creative pursuit! Creativity thrives under constraints. Adding the “constraint” of a clear problem to solve allows engineers the freedom to explore and create a solution in the way they see fit.

The best engineers I know are product-minded: thinking about solving the problem for humans first and foremost, which leads to the next point.