Easy Software Engineering Wins for This Week

*Photo by* *Giorgio Trovato @giorgiotrovato* *on Unsplash*

It’s a new week!

As the sun rises on an exciting week of work, we might like to start to think about what targets we want to hit.

Typically, you might aim for a hard-to-achieve goal. If that’s you and you have the confidence and ability to go for it, I suggest that you go for one of these lofty wins:

get a raise
get a promotion

*Photo by* *Kenny Eliason @neonbrand* *on Unsplash*

This would be perfect! However, your week might not be quite that exciting.

The small wins also count.

Here are some suggestions for those small software engineering wins (and a few that aren’t coding-based) that you can aim for this week.

Fixing a Tricky Bug

Closing JIRA tickets is always a cause for celebration. Perhaps this is the week you will have a go at that tricky bug that nobody wanted to touch for the longest time.

*Photo by* *Sebastian Ashton @seb_ashton* *on Unsplash*

If that sounds like a challenge which is too big and too much perhaps some preparatory refactoring is more achievable.

Practice Clean Code

Are you doing the best you can in your current PR to follow clean code practices?

Could you make it that little bit better by writing code that is a little easier to understand?

You know you could. You understand how to write great code and unfortunately just stop short at times.

Aiming to do better can be a small thing (naming variables correctly) or something as complex as undertaking a larger project. What’s great is that this is something you can decide!

Write a Unit Test

Haven’t had the chance to unit test that tricky piece of code? Spend some time covering edge cases or scenarios that might have been missed.

Work to improve your codebase and become more thorough and detail-oriented while you are at it!

Document Your Work

Spend some time this week documenting your work.

This could come in the form of updating a README file. It might mean adding (or removing) some comments from your code. You might write a brief guide about some edge cases or help develop the documentation for more junior developers to set up the project.

*Photo by* *Sarah Elizabeth @sarah_elizabeth* *On Unsplash*

Remember that good documentation can help everyone involved in the project, and good work seldom goes unnoticed.

Conclusion

Whatever your target, make sure you can hit it and get it done by Friday and make sure you are a dev winner this week!