The Power of Small Steps: Daily Rituals for Better Development
"Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become." - James Clear, author of Atomic Habits
My teammate Stefan, an avid fan of 'Atomic Habits', and I discussed ways to enhance our development process. We identified certain tasks that, while not immediately critical, could hinder our progress or create issues in the future.
Since we both appreciate the 'Atomic Habits' framework, we decided to implement its concepts, particularly the two-minute rule, into our workflow. Here are a few examples of what we have accomplished so far:
"Morning Sentry" Ritual
Given that we use Sentry for error tracking and have around 20 microservices in our project, going through all microservices would consume a lot of time. Alternatively, diving into every potentially critical issue we stumble upon would also be time-consuming.
Instead of losing a couple of hours per week on checking the entire Sentry project list, each morning we randomly select three services per developer—three for me and three for Stefan—which takes us at most 5 to 10 minutes. Afterward, we can continue with our regular development.
"Compilation Warning" Ritual
The second tiny ritual that we introduced concerns removing compile warnings. After migrating our microservices from Akka and Play 2.8 to Pekko and Play 3.0, we encountered a high number of warnings during compile time.
Most of them are insignificant, but we should properly address them. So, anytime we open our IDE to work, we clean up at least a couple of warnings on the service on which we are currently working. I hope that in the next few months, we will be rid of all warnings or at least have a really small number of them.
This method is similar to the “Greasing the Groove” method for building strength.
There’s a fantastic episode about the greasing method on the “Art of Manliness” podcast.
"Feature Flag Cleanup" Ritual
We use feature flags to work on multiple tasks simultaneously without releasing them all at once.
About two years ago, we cleaned up our code and found many old feature flags we weren’t using.
Like the Sentry Ritual we introduced, we added a 'Feature Flag Cleanup Day'. On the last Tuesday of each month, we review the feature flag list, check for obsolete flags, and clean up both the code that references them and the feature flags themselves.
We no longer have issues like, 'Why are we checking if this feature is enabled for the user? This feature was completed 4 months ago.'
Building Habits
As James said, building habits is an ongoing process in life and a professional career.
Everybody has some kind of ritual, such as checking email or replying to Slack messages piled up from the previous day. We just provided a few examples of habits that we are using to become better developers.
Rome wasn't built in a day, and taking it one step at a time is what counts.