Frameworks come and go. Principles stay. ✨
After a few years of writing software — from MVPs built from scratch 🚀 to legacy systems nobody dared to touch 👻 — I've come to realize something: the developers I admire most aren't the ones who know the most frameworks. They're the ones who follow a few simple principles, consistently, on every line they write.
Over time, I've collected my own set of principles. They act like a compass 🧭: whenever I'm unsure how to approach a problem, I come back to them. None of them are mine — they've been shaped by people much smarter than me — but together they form the way I work. Let me walk you through each one, with examples from real life. 👇
This one, from Kent Beck, is the backbone of everything else. It's an order of priorities, and the order matters:
An example 💡. You need to display a list of users. The trap is to immediately think about caching, pagination, and database indexes. Don't. First, fetch the list and render it (it works). Then extract a clean component and add a test (it's right). Then, only if the page is actually slow, add caching (it's fast).
