Welcome to a multipart blog post about a few development lessons I recently learned. These lessons took too long for me to learn. While I wrote this to remind my future self, I would also like to help others if they struggle with the same things.
For my day job, I usually design front-facing websites. I rarely do any development directly for customers (with a few exceptions). On the side, I often find myself building tools that help run my retail/entertainment business or to expand my knowledge.
Take what I say with a grain of salt. Many of these things I have heard many times on Twitter or Reddit. I've always understood the concept of most of them, but it took a long time to implement them in my workflow.