Main image of article Five Ways to be the Best Programmer in Your Company

Summary

What does best programmer mean? Is it the highest paid programmer, most technically skilled, most popular or the person most adept at climbing the work ladder? Well, you’d expect the most technically skilled to be the highest paid but it doesn’t always happen. You want your name to be top of the list for bonuses, the person who gets asked first if they want to be on a new project or alternatively the person whose name is bottom of the list when redundancies are looming.

Here are five tips to becoming the best programmer where you work.

If you think your work speaks for you, that’s not enough. You need to sing your praises to those that matter. Your manager may know that you are the bees’ knees but does anyone else know? The key to this is communication, a skill that many developers lack. Let people know what you are working on and don’t be the person who keeps their head down and just gets on with it. You are trying to market yourself; speak up at meetings and keep a list of your accomplishments and when appropriate remind people of what you have done. Connect with other teams, join internal forums and develop an internal presence.

Developing software isn’t just about writing code; it’s also managing builds, preparing data, writing and running tests and other jobs that need doing but which no one really wants to do. Documentation, particularly technical, is an area that is often very poorly managed in companies that don’t practise software engineering. It’s also a good way to help you understand the business better; you can’t write documents if you don’t understand how things work. Once you do understand it though then you are able to write technical specs, and design APIs and database architecture. Be the goto guy for the technologies that others lack. Can you explain Git rebase, how to profile SQL or show how AI agentic mode works?

Practice writing code a lot and if your employer allows time for you to do non-work stuff, spend it experimenting on side projects, enter hackathons, study new technologies in case they have a use. If you can’t do this at work, try doing side projects at home as long as they don’t compete with your employer’s business. Make sure you check the legalities first and use your own hardware, not work computers. Some employers have been known to claim ownership of software developed in your own time, on your own equipment so dig out your contract of employment before you start.

When I started writing code for a living, I’d estimate based on how long I thought it would take just to write the code. That was a mistake; it also needs to include the time taken to debug, to document it (maybe) and allow some slack to cover unexpected events like hardware failure, software updates, colleagues requesting your time, waiting on other teams, change in requirements, unexpected complexity, fixing bugs and others. All of these can blow up your estimate so you need to build in extra time just in case. How much extra time depends on the complexity of the software and how well you understand it. There’s no hard and fast rule; it depends on context and some developers just double their initial estimate. Anything between 20% and 100% extra is fine as long as you can justify it. Provide a short list of possible problems along with the estimate to soften the blow.

This is when you are intensely focused on problem solving and become very productive for periods of 30 minutes to an hour. It can take 15-30 minutes to get into it and any interruption will knock you out of it. While you are in the zone, you experience greater clarity and can hold more things in memory at once and see deeper into problems. The longest I ever did it was at night helping a colleague write a complicated graphical display on an MSX computer. I figured out what I needed to solve and got there after a five-hour period where I got into the zone a couple of times. Some writers use word processors that switches into a mode with all the buttons hidden and shows just text. For programmers you have to switch your phone to silent and put it away. Don’t check your email or browse the web. Just write code. Wear headphones and listen to some familiar and not loud music to shield you from the noise around you.

Will these tips guarantee that you will be the best programmer where you work? Probably not but they will go a long way towards it.