Habits I Learned Too Late as a Developer — Part 1

Source: Dev.to

Not following high-quality open-source projects

I used GitHub mainly as a place to store my own code, which meant I missed:

• How real‑world projects are structured
• How maintainers review pull requests
• How design decisions are discussed in issues
• What “production‑quality” code actually looks like

Reading good code consistently turned out to be just as important as writing my own.

What I do now

Even when I’m not actively coding, I visit GitHub weekly and check my starred repositories. This habit alone changed how I think about code quality.

Not knowing developer communities like Medium, dev.to, or CodePen

For a long time, learning meant courses, tutorials, and bootcamps only. What I later realized:

• Courses teach ideal scenarios, and sooner or later you forget most of them.
• Community posts show real‑world mistakes and trade‑offs.
• Small experiments often teach more than full tutorials.

Platforms such as dev.to and CodePen expose you to problems people are actively solving, not just concepts explained in isolation. Following challenges and community experiments is also fun.

If I want to become a better developer, I need to enjoy the learning process, not just endure it.