6 Things to Keep Coding an Art

Coding is an art and if you don’t use the right techniques your artistic abilities aren’t going to show through your work.

1. Stay Consistent, Stay Clean – Lots of professionals will even fail in this area. Keeping things consistent will leave your code as clean and readable as possible. It’s something that should be learned right from the beginning and followed through in every one of your projects. DON’T leave messy code behind for others to shake their heads at.
2. Plan Ahead, Set Goals – Your coding day should always be planned out ahead of time. Your code should look clean and thought out. What are the most important areas of the project? Wheres the best place to start? What are we going to ad later that might interfere with what we’re doing now? When do I want this aspect of the project to be finished?
3. Optimize Your Code, For Speed – You should try to make your code as time friendly as possible. If your using something like C++ or Python you don’t have to worry too much. However, if your running PHP, JSP, ASP, Ruby, Perl etc. you might need to do something to speed up your code just a bit.
4. Be Original Yet Improve on Existing Ideas – Try to identify the flaws in existing ideas and correct them in your own work.
5. Test Your Coding Theory – Testing is one of the most important parts of coding. You learn by testing, you improve by testing and you prove by testing. Your code is just theory until it’s properly tested. If you don’t test your code, 9 times out of 10 says it’s going to be full of bugs.
6. Improve Your Skills – Theres always something new and crazy to learn that you never knew before. Keep looking for something that will help you improve your skills and make you a better programmer.

Hope this helps.