Comment by techfeathers

I think part of this is you have to know yourself. I imagine there are some people out there who can really sort of discipline themselves into doing a good job - through checklists or really good review processes.

Personally I do everything in my power not to be disciplined. I intentionally make my first draft terrible. I almost make it my goal to write bad code instead of good code(. I’m an SRE not a full time developer for what it’s worth)

And then I sort of find adversarial ways to circle around the solution. Write tests etc. I don’t know how to describe it but I never want a close eye or “discipline” to be the solution to the problem. Use tools for linting/schema validation/testing and trust them and when they don’t catch something evolve them.

It’s funny you say “rarely, but sometimes I have bad weeks”. Whereas I approach it the opposite. Sure every once in a while I have a good week where I don’t make many mistakes. But I approach my work like making mistakes is the rule, not the exception. And lean into it.

And I will say it would be crazy of me to say that in all this time I haven’t developed a pretty good eye. I certainly catch a lot of things people with less experience don’t, and my first drafts are much better now then they were earlier in my career. But I don’t rely on that experience, because I’m fallible.