Developer's block

Developer's block

23 August 2025

SoftwareDevelopment

Writer’s block is the paralysis induced by a blank page, but software developers experience a similar block and it can even get worse over time. Sometimes a good analogy is that your wheels are spinning and you need to gain traction.

Let’s look at the different kinds of developer’s block, what causes them, and how to get unblocked.

A new project and it’s going to be your best ever

You want to write great code. In fact, most developers want each of their coding projects to be their best ever. That means different thing to different people, but if you apply all of the following practices from the start, you’ll soon get blocked.

Once you buy into the benefits of testing, you’ll want to include decent unit and integration test suits in your code. Of course, at least in the longer term, a decent test suite helps maintain velocity. Right? You might also want to include some fuzz testing, to exercise edge cases you haven’t thought of.

When you’ve realised how useful good documentation is, you’ll want a good README or user guide and probably some other documentation on how to contribute to or maintain the code. You might want to document community standards too, just in case.

Then there are specific coding practices that you have learned such as good naming, modularity, and the creation and use of reusable libraries. You’ll want to stick to those, even if they need a bit more effort up front.

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