I ate an hamburguer inside a “bolo do caco” (caco cake) after coding a calculator and there is still work to be done, like a lot. It is day number 10 of my daily challenge, writing in 15 minutes from Portugal in the great city walls of Braga! From here on I’ll be using this ashtag #dailychallenge10.

For real, there is always something to change, some code to be writen in better ways, a piece of work still to be done and we don’t stop until we finish it because our mind is in “developer mode”.

Developer mode is not about developers or programming or whatever kind of coding people do. It is a mindset of people that are trying to build something wrecklessly. So how do you know you are entering Developer Mode:

1. It’s when we are making something great;
2. Our hearts are put in that work, we fell in love for what we are doing;
3. We are aiming for perfection, it has to be top notch material;
4. We don’t plan because that is a waste of time;
5. We don’t need design or “drawings”, the project is in our head and it’s perfect like that;
6. We don’t even set any goals, dead-lines or milestones.

Whooops…. The milestones! The deadlines! PLANnING!!!!

That’s how I ruined lots of my personal projects. Like once that I tried to write a code for a card game with ruby-on-rails…. The coding process was fun until I stumbled in the freaking part where there was no plan about how it actually works. Or my favorite, when I write a code that works but I didn’t thought about the other possibilities and had to write it all A.G.A.I.N.

So aiming for perfection without any goals ordeadlines can be frustrating and worthless, special without a piece of design (i.e. planning for development).

Hope this psot helps you as a reminder for future “developer mode” attempts in your brain.

Cheers,

Delmar Almeida