9 Anti-Patterns Every Programmer Should Be Aware Of

A healthy dose of self-criticism is fundamental to professional and personal growth. When it comes to programming, this sense of self-criticism requires the ability to detect unproductive or counter-productive patterns in designs, code, processes, and behaviour. This is why a knowledge of anti-patterns is very useful for any programmer. This article is a discussion of anti-patterns that I have found to be recurring, ordered roughly based on how often I have come across them, and how long it took to undo the damage they caused.

Some of the anti-patterns discussed have elements in common with cognitive biases, or are directly caused by them. Links to relevant cognitive biases are provided as we go along in the article. Wikipedia also has a nice list of cognitive biases for your reference.

And before starting, let’s remember that dogmatic thinking stunts growth and innovation so consider the list as a set of guidelines…