Do Yourself a Favor — Read More Code
In order to learn how to write, you first need to learn how to read. One of the best ways to improve your writing is to read more content from a variety of authors.
The answer is no. Maybe because it’s quite hard to do well, or just because engineers focus more on making things work and force the computer to do what they want it to do without thinking about anything else.
This focus on short term execution is what makes it so hard to find good developers. At the end of the day — many of the so-called developers around focus on writing code and running it. Not understanding it. Not thinking about it. Not learning about it.
There are several ways to learn how to code better. We can read books, such as Clean Code, The Pragmatic Programmer and Clean Architecture, those will teach you theory. We can read software engineering blogs that will guide us in specific cases.
As software engineers, we tend to work a lot with other people’s code. This is mostly correct in large codebases. Being able to read other people’s code fast and understand it well — is a key to integrating with it effectively. Most of the time (especially if the code in stake is internal), you cannot assume documentation is correct. The code, on the other hand, is always correct.
