Good Code

Been long since I wrote about good practices. Good development practices. If you aint doing what I'll mention here,
you need to evaluate how you do stuff. I'm not the best adviser out there, but I know what I did and turned around my productivity. The things I'll advice you to do here, are the things I used not to do, inturn spending the whole night doing almost nothing.

I mean, spending the whole night for a bug not worth it.

Will expound on each.

1. Always have a local copy

Basically, have a copy of your project in your machine. The best way to have this is to clone it in your machine if you're developing from online.
I use lamp stack, so, I have a copy at www directory, which serves as a go-to for references incase of anything, and also for adding new stuff to the project.

2. Test Environment

This is an online copy just for tests. This is important for examining how the system behaves while hosted. This copy is located at the production environment or a system with production environment settings.
Remember, set it as a sub-domain. You don't want a client's project out there before launch.
I usually push my projects to heroku, or my domain.

3. Live Environment

This is now the live copy of the system. This is where the system sits after development. This is where it's gonna be. This needs to be guarded well, secured, tested well, no downtimes and all that.

This is usually vetoed by the client. S/he is the one to say where the system is going to sit.

Your work as a developer in this phase is just to deploy the system, and/or advice the client on the best hosting environment.

4. Daemon

This is run as a background process, rather than being under the direct control of an interactive user. At this point, have all logs up and running. Have a way of troubleshooting and/or backtracking errors that may arise while the system is running.

Did I say I was stuck with an issue and the person to assist me always asked me of logs? I didn't. I didn't have them. I hadn't setup any daemon service, logging and all that.

It was hard for him to help me out. I set up all this and called him. After seeing I've done that, he proposed a face-to-face meeting instead of skype calls. (guess he saw I was ready to learn)

It worked readers.

Some errors are generated from some upgrades which aren't compatible, or modules which have redundant functionalities.

With these kept in mind, you'll be a better person than you were yesterday.