Honing Your Programming Skill: Top 6 Coding Mistakes To Avoid

Coding Mistakes

Programming or coding, which we’ll use interchangeably here, is a skill that takes constant learning, improvements, and a lot of hard work. Regardless of how interested you’re in it, no one is born knowing everything, and you’ll need to hone your skill to perfection by hours of trying and failing and trying again.

However, there are a few aspects of coding that many beginners make, which can mean a difference between an average coder and an exceptional one that everyone wants to hire.

Checkout Top Six Coding Mistakes To Avoid

Here are the top six coding mistakes you should avoid the next time you code.

1. Overcomplicating Your Algorithms

Whether you’re a novice just starting your coding journey and struggling with centering an image in HTML or an expert coder with years of experience and hundreds of apps behind them, this is likely a mistake you’ve been making or have made in the past.

The simpler, the better, is a famous quote for a reason. When solving a coding problem, you must think outside the box rather than focus on the problem itself. Look into the root of it, which will allow you to create much simpler algorithms you can apply to more than the single problem you’ve been facing.

2. Using Vulnerable Open-Source Code

Another common mistake many coders make, not just beginners, is relying too much on open-source code. Although open-source apps are adored in the coding communities, their code can pose a significant security risk and should be avoided when possible. Instead, focus on creating a piece of code that’s yours and does what you want it to do.

Moreover, various open-source licenses can be highly problematic if you’re working for a company, as open-source code can have several use limitations. Fortunately, various SCA tools by JFrog can help with this part and are highly beneficial to coders of all levels of expertise.

3. Completely Disregarding Scalability

Good code is code that can solve more than just the issue it was intended to solve. That’s why this mistake can be somewhat tied to the first item in this list, as programmers often think about the problem itself. They often overlook entirely their code’s future and the issues it can solve alongside the main one.

However, just like creating simpler algorithms applicable in various situations, programmers can also focus on their code’s scalability and consider how their code can be implemented for other issues ahead of time. That leads to versatile code that can be used more than once, creating a much better software experience.

4. Disregarding Error Handling

A piece of software never is and never will be perfect. Your app will crash, have weird bugs occurring, or outright won’t load sometimes. No matter how good you are, creating perfect code and running it without hiccups on all the different machines is impossible.

What you can do, however, is implement a proper error-handling mechanism, which will let users, testers, and other coders report any issues they encounter. That can help gather info about your code’s functionality and let you, as its creator, fix it by looking into these issues.

5. Not Documenting Your Code

Where the most significant number of coders fails is disregarding proper code documentation. Essentially, they focus on solving the problem too much, which works, but it creates a piece of software that only the coders that made it can understand.

If you want to create helpful code for both you in your future projects and others, you should properly document it. At the very least, add comments throughout your code and describe what each code block does, as it’ll allow you to reuse it in the future and help other coders understand how your code functions.

6. Failing to Test Your Code Properly

For your code to be effective and efficient and for your algorithm to be able to solve various coding problems, you need to thoroughly and properly test it in different conditions and see how it responds. Doing this ensures that your code is correctly written and represents an excellent piece of software.

Such tests also include intentionally breaking your code to see what’s causing the issue. That way, you can fix it, optimize it much better, allow your code to run without hiccups in various scenarios, and solve many programming issues.

Conclusion

Although countless teenagers see IT and programming as the skills of the future, and many go into these industries, only a few are good at it or successful. Even a tech-wiz can fail if they don’t consider the six aspects of coding we have mentioned here.

However, considering these top coding mistakes can mean a massive improvement in your programming skill. Actively thinking about these during your coding sessions will improve your coding game significantly, so don’t forget them the next time you sit down to code.

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