Far too often in our industry, people climb to the top of their blogs and shout to the rest of the world: “You’re doing it wrong! I’m doing it right! Maybe if you were more like me, you’d be more successful. Maybe if you were more like me, I’d consider you to be a real programmer. Maybe if you were more like me, I’d want to work with you, and I wouldn’t shudder in the very depths of my soul every time I looked at your code.”

And I know. I do it too, sometimes. But I want to make up for it. Here’s a brief list of some things I know I’m doing wrong:

• I don’t write tests first as often as I should.
• I regularly make changes/bugfixes in code without taking a few minutes to make the surrounding code any better.
• I break code out into new objects when I shouldn’t, and I pile methods onto existing objects when they should be split into their own class.
• I regularly succumb to the pressure of my todo list, and let myself push quick fixes out the door when I feel overwhelmed.
• I often care more about how the code looks to me than about how it works for the customer.
• I sometimes approach problems with a “we can’t do that” attitude instead of approaching it from the “how can we make this work?” angle.

Everybody makes mistakes, and everyone has pet problems they’re working on. Maybe we should be less worried about telling every other developer how to do their job, and focus more on sharing what we’ve learned about our own habits?