What little habits made you a better software engineer?

Quora上看到的一个回答, 认为记工作日志是一个好工程师最需要的习惯. 

https://www.quora.com/What-little-habits-made-you-a-better-software-engineer/answer/Chris-Nash-10?srid=oYUu

I will share the most important habit I developed many years ago, on the example of a peer/mentor: keep a work log. If you only take one piece of advice from this question, let it be this. Holy Moly.

I used to spend several minutes a day figuring out where it was I left off, either the day before or even just returning from a meeting:

• Did I check in that code?
• Where was I in that solution?
• Did I decide to inherit for that new class or just implement an interface?
• What was the name of that script that rebooted the dev server?
• What was the name of the environment where the solution is deployed?

It was a waste of time, but I didn’t put much thought into it. I figured it was a necessary part of work. Then a friend showed me his work log. It included what he did that day, action items from meetings and lots of little notes to himself. He didn’t explicitly recommend it, but to me, a noob compared to him, it was amazing. Everything he did or needed to do was right there, at his finger tips!

He implemented his in HTML, so I followed his example. Then I switched to Word. Then Evernote. Then OneNote. What you use to keep your notes isn’t as important as KEEPING THOSE NOTES.

Here is a brief example of some of my notes from a task:

• Looking at the call that the "button" makes
  • Like where it gets its info from
  • They're using system.getHost(), not the host provided in the config
• Trying the "reference" implementation
  • It works!
• Reworking code
  • You know, fixing it up
  • WORKS!!!
• CHECKING THIS SUCKER IN!
  • Done!

As you can see, my format is a list, but you can use whatever format works for you. And remember, they’re just for you, so you can annotate them any way you like. Personally, I keep track of separate tasks on separate pages; an augment to my habit I recently developed.

They also serve as a nice CYA tool. If your boss comes to you and says, “Roger, I don’t think you’re doing anything. Your LOC is zero for the last week.” You can whip out your work log and show him all the notes you’ve kept on your design for your new feature and show him all the useless meetings he forced you to attend that are keeping you from slamming out code.

Keep a work log and be successful and more productive. Here endeth the lesson.