Here is a list about some practices that, in my opinion, can make day to day work easier, simpler and just better:
- communicate clearly, but most importantly communicate often: more context = less nonsense meetings
- got stuck with something? pair-programming can almost always get it done faster
- ask questions, a lot of questions. you may be helping another person in the team and you walk away wiser. plus is better to "lose time" now than in a later on high-stakes situation (on call/hotfixing/prod down)
- got a meeting? have your environment up and running before hand, and anything else you might need to present or need a hand with. lots of time is lost here
- don't just nod to people asking for new features, explain how and why some of their proposals might not be the right thing to do. this can cost a lot of time and planning later on, and all eyes will be on you
- don't half-ass it. technical debt will bite you sooner or later. as said before, better do it right when you can "spare time"
- own what you do, end-to-end. from dev to prod, if something happens in between it's your responsibility
- create good PRs, from branch naming and description to clean and atomic commits. someone else might lean on it later
- take your time to write good, thorough emails, documentation, even messages when you are asking for something. again, someone else might lean on it later
- have a good CI/CD pipeline, but also simple enough to fit in one step. multiple steps are error prone
- if there is anything repetitive in your work, automate it. probably other people will benefit from it
- if possible, daily builds, daily releases (at least internally)
- have a bug database: steps to reproduce, expected behavior, bug itself, person assigned, fixed or not
- have really good onboarding docs. this will save a lot of time for new hires and for them to hit the ground up and running
- have good working conditions. this set you up for everything else
- have a hacky solution for making something work? build a tool around it. maybe it ends up becoming standard
- use good tools (team-wise), time lost and bad experiences end up compounding
- take a lot of meeting notes
- present your opinion and let it be challenged, leaving space for others'
- have an ever-growing technical/quality bar. you should be skeptical of what you wrote 6 months ago
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