How to become a good developer

I spoke to Robert few days back. He is PUM in Microsoft. It was a one on one meeting. Below are some learnings I had picked from that meeting.

1. Strive for simplistic design. Don't over engineer things.

2. Go through your Career Specific profiles. Go through each bullet. Do an honest self assessment and see where you are lacking.

3. Develop your communication skills. As a developer you have a huge role to play in Microsoft.

4. Discover the design patterns. It takes time to develop these skills but it has got a huge impact.

5. It is critical to test your code. Have a lot of automation. Do a lot of unit testing.

6. Ability to narrow down the bug quickly.

7. There seems to be a tendency in people to hop from job to job in order to grow. Instead invest in yourself and build a solid foundation, because if you switch to another company the same problems would breed again.

8. If you ever encounter a bug , take some action so that it doesn't reproduce. Add some test automation, educate someone or whatever it takes but do something about it.

9. If you want to become a manager, learn to instill inspiration amongst others.

Visual Studio's (or .NET's) equivalent of GDB's watch

People coming in from native background (I mean those who have been using GDB extensively) might get perplexed by the fact that they can't watch a variable in .NET. Reason being, when you ask the debugger to watch a particular variable or object (to let you know when a particular value is accessed or modified) you are basically asking the debugger to watch a physical address. And the fact that garbage collector can reshuffle the objects in memory obviates this possibility.

So what do you do? You refactor the code, define brand new get/set properties for that variable and start accessing it through them. Now you can put in break-points in the get and set properties.