I have 3 guiding principles for a Developer. Now that I am a team lead, this makes even more sense for me and my team. Whenever we write code, we think about these 3 points. We use this in our code reviews as well.
- Simplicity
- Consistent
- Reliable
These have worked wonderfully well for me personally and to our team as well. We have got a reputation of delivering reliable code. We got feedback from other dev teams that our solutions and code are simple, readable & reliable.
Simplicity & Consistency helps the developers to iterate fast. I usually tell this to my team “Consistent bad patterns are better than random good patterns”. It confuses devs a lot when they move across projects as the coding patterns are different in each one of them.
Reliability comes from a unique thought process. Think of edge cases should become second nature to you. Of course, this won’t happen overnight, but you will get better at it. This is one place where senior devs shine, as they can see things juniors might not.