[jrockway]

This is not great advice, but I try to make sure I only write software that I use. That way if something is painful to me, I know people that didn't write the code have no chance of being able to use it, so it has to change.

Certainly, in a software engineer's career, you'll often be asked to make things that are not directly useful to you. Force yourself to use them anyway, or you miss that valuable path of getting feedback -- "do I even like it?" If you made it and you don't like it, it's probably not good.

I think this, in general, does yield pretty good results. I think software engineers have much better work tools than other engineers (Emacs is a lot nicer than Solidworks), and that's because you use the tools you make to develop the tools you're making, and get a lot of experience in what it's like to be a user.