Improve Your Quality by Following the Rules

Have you ever thought about where best practices come from? Or how they become second nature for some professionals rather than something (frustratingly) tacked on at the end? Have you ever looked at your own personal projects and found them full of spaghetti code or disorganized files? If not you’re either lying or in denial.

The truth is when we work on our own projects, most of us skip the rules and just wing it. Instead of modularizing and unit testing our code it’s all strung together in a giant web. Instead of properly organizing the layers in our mockups, we leave the generated names and unused layers. We’ve become so accustomed to sweeping everything under the rug while no one was looking, making it harder on ourselves in our every day work.

Professionals though, they’ll stick to the rules and follow best practices on every project they create. They know that consistently applying their craft, even if the project will never be seen in the public eye, is the key to quality work. If, like me, you hope to reach that level of quality, you have to start applying to the standards with every file, no matter what. Without that kind of determination, we’ll always just be catching up.