What is the best sign of a great development job? When nobody knows you were there. Yes, development can be a thankless job which requires hours of toil, bugs and head pounding stress. In the end, nobody even realizes you did it!

All that work and we’re rewarded by what? Simply put, money and pride. Yes, I put money first because it is typically required for survival. Sure, it’s the root of all evil but it also puts food on the table for our families and allows us to pay monthly bills. Pride is our next big plus, if you don’t have pride in your work you’ll become “just another coder.”

Pride drives you to success, allows you to grow as a developer and feel good about the job you do when nobody else notices. If people notice your job it will typically come in the form of a site outage or “unexpected” errors. Nobody wants their customers to click “add to cart” and be rewarded with a fatal PHP error - that’s a loss of a customer.

Nobody wants to utilize a specially design module, that you hand crafted, to be rewarded with a blank white screen or apache server crash. If you design stable, reusable code nobody will notice you were there.

Expect one person (or group), besides yourself, to notice your work where all others fail to see the beauty: the ones that paid you to do the work. A cost considered “well spent” by a firm is the one where nobody fears of failure or instability. This will lead to great references and more jobs in the future, which in turn means more money for you.

Consider this: your development efforts are not unlike a Porsche, leave the designer to build a beautiful body and presentation, you take the time to build a beautiful engine and suspension.

A beautiful body design gets the customer in the door but the cost justification and reputation of a sweet sports car is all about what’s under the hood.