A few months ago i gave a talk at Django girls Minna event, and i keep getting questions like: How did you become such a badass developer? How do i go from being a Genin to becoming a Kage…?

So this is my attempt to answer those questions. Please not am not a “kage” yet but i think over the years i have learnt a thing or two.

Always Plan your projects

The most common mistake you see developers making is falling to plan, some even think its not their job. The truth is good planing helps save lots of time, reduces stress and comfortably finish on time everyday.

There are lots of awesome planning tools like trello( create a project board and cards for each of your templates and elements), writemaps, oh and the good old paper and pencil

Never stop being curious

New tools, plugins, techniques and languages are being released almost everyday, its very important you stay open to all the new things and make an effort to explore and understand them

The bad and at the same time the beauty of front-end development is that it’s moving forward very fast. This means that you can quickly become an expert but also your skills can become very quickly outdated.

You don’t need to know everything, just having a rough overview about a topic or technique is fine. You can then dive deeper into it when the right project comes along.

Invest in your skills

But isn’t that the same as being curious? NO.

You will need to invest in yourself in order to grow. I don’t mean spending money on expensive courses, seminars or books, I am more thinking about investing your time. There is no short-cut to success and researches show that it takes around 10000 hours to master a skill , that’s around 4 years practicing 40 hours a week.

Be prepared to put up with late nights exploring other websites, experimenting with a new plugins and frameworks, reading web development blogs, listening to podcasts and chewing through thousands of tweets.

Find a mentor

And i don’t mean someone you just admire and will probably never meet till you die, Find someone with more experience than you, someone who is keen to help you to grow.

A good mentor will help you:

• to get advice on your project approach
• to get a sense of direction
• to help you foresee any potential roadblocks

Keep it Simple

Planning for the unlikely makes code unnecessarily complex. Don’t try to foresee your project’s requirements in two years from now — too many things can (and will ) change! You would waste time on an overly complex solution for a problem that proves to be different than you thought.

Keep in mind: Keeping it simple shouldn’t be confused with “quick and dirty”. You still have to work thoroughly and carefully!

Unit Testing

Every programmer has experienced something like this: you change a bit of code in one corner, and in a (seemingly) unrelated corner, something breaks! The bitter truth is: both new and changed code will inevitably contain bugs. Use automated tests that help you keep old code stable.

That’s it fellas, let me know what you think or if you think i missed something… keep slaying that code tho mighty developer