Part 3 of our “Programming Best Practices” series.

We talked about test-driven development and mobile-first development, but now we’re going to look at something very basic to programming.

Don’t Recreate the Wheel

This is one I always had difficulty with because it felt like I was cheating. When I first did secure.91ferns.com I thought it would have been cheating to use a web framework like Cake or Zend - so I wrote it framework free. Sure, it was all custom and that was great, but it left a lot of holes in the code and made me repeat a lot of the code I wrote.

If I had just used a framework it would be easier to read my code, easier for others to read my code, and easier to extend what I did. Now, making modifications is a huge hassle and one I try to avoid as much as possible. These frameworks were written with best practices in mind and were written by teams of very talented and experienced programmers - don’t be afraid to leverage their wisdom in every project you do.

I hope this helps make sense of why development has moved in a certain direction, and hope it helps you stay on track. Development changes - don’t fall behind! Keep reading and programming and learning and you’ll give yourself much more job security.