One Tip to Improve you as a Developer — Shorten The Feedback Loop

What’s the feedback loop in development?

Its the time it takes for you to get critical and useful feedback on the output of the code you have produced. The shorter this time becomes the better you will become as a programmer.

Feedback is critical for a developer. There are so many things to take into account when writing software that it’s almost impossible to guarantee all the effects from the changes you do. That is why feedback is so important. It can at least give the developer an idea of whether or not they are on the write path in the code they are writing.

But what kind of feedback can a developer utilise?

Testing

Testing is probably the most obvious example of feedback a developer can receive on the code they have written. The simplest example of this is the ‘Unit Test’. You write a function to do something. You write a unit test to test this function. Then you run the test and it either passes or fails.

You almost instantly know if your function is good or not.

If it’s good you can move on to the next task. If it’s not, then you can improve the code until it is.

(The caveat here being that the quality of this feedback is very much determined…