[wiseleo]

The biggest change for me was adopting clean code practices.

What it meant in practice is writing functions as a collection of calls to other smaller functions. Each function does only one thing. I spend most time on naming objects, functions, and variables. It is hard in the beginning to not use non-descriptive names, but then you have to re-read that code and mentally rename it each time in your head while struggling to understand what it does.

Writing test code to validate shorter functions becomes fluid. When you can easily understand your code and can depend on it not breaking, you will find it’s easier to add features and expand existing features.

You will find many good talks on YouTube, but they really summarize what they wrote in books.

One good exercise is to reimplement built-in language algorithms like sorting and string manipulation from scratch.