I was a victim of writing code just to learn and I enjoyed coding just for fun.

I fell in love with writing code just to make it work and I fell out of my ways to write secure code but now, I know better and I am still willing to learn more.

Therefore, I want to share the three basic motives of writing code that always help me keep my sanity whenever I write code. They go thus:

1. Write Code that Saves the Day:

Whether you work for companies, clients or yourself, you will need to write code to solve some urgent and important issues.

But before you write a line of code, you need to ask yourself, “Is it urgent and is it important ?”.

If yes, the reason for writing code, in that case, is to fix the issue as quickly as possible, so direct your attention to fixing the issue.

You don’t want your company to lose her clients or customers because of some stubborn bugs in your software that prevent users from using the core part of your software or costing your company $10,000 per hour.

Therefore, you need to code with speed to fix the bug to save the day.

Also, if you are starting a software that currently has no user base, you won’t want to over-architect|build it and spend a lot of time doing so instead of using such time to find users to use the software.

Don’t get me wrong! Having a basic software architecture that is future proof is okay, but overdoing such at the expense of releasing the product itself is not acceptable.

“Make it work”

2. Write Code for the Unexpected:

Sh*t happens!

Situations you don’t expect will surely surface whether you plan for them or not.

Some facilities your software depends on will go out of service, your software would be hacked, your employees would compromise your software and “unexpected” will hold you tight because sh*t happens!

Fine! You have to be proactive about unexpected as a software developer.

However, you don’t know the best way to prepare for the future but you can design your software in a way that makes fixing things easy for developers

When you have time, think about how you can design your software with unexpected in mind.

Writing automated tests is one of the proactive ways to prepare your team for unexpected.

Some developers expect unexpected by writing simple, clean and deterministic code.

Some use error trackers like Sentry to expect unexpected.

You can also put your software on hackerone.com to be hacked ethically.

Cool!

There are so many ways to skin a goat. Just expect unexpected!

3 Write Code that Helps Others or your Future:

Don’t be stuck with the present or the present will be your future.

It is easy to just make things work and be fixing things from time to time.

I call that approach the “War Time Software Development Approach”.

If you don’t force yourself, you won’t be able to think about the future because you will have a lot of bugs to fix.

Whenever you find yourself in wartime moments, sit back to find out how to uproot the issues.

Write reusable code, automate recurrent activities and build things so that you don’t need to labour in the future.

One more thing

Take care of yourself and health.

In conclusion, there are so many reasons to write code, but — in my experience — the three reasons listed above can help any developer to be more effective as a problem solver as well as a software developer dealing with business objectives.

What do you think?

Any additions, subtractions or opinion?

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