Product development and problem solving

Hi..,
It has been long time since i blogged something. Today is a holiday and i hardly have any work at home. I just have to throw away my used clothes into the machine. So today I wanted to write something about how product development world and problem solving is. I just have 6 months of experience in product development. But I still think I can feed some college graduates(especially who have had no internship experiences in product development- so almost all grads from CIT).

When you are in college (and if you have interest in writing code), you write a lot of code. Many college grads use windows, linux , unix as their predominant platforms of developing and technologies like unmagaged code (c, c++) , java , managed code(.net) .
According to me , a good coder should be a master of logic that is not specific to any platform or technology , should have decent awareness in her favorite technology and should write code that is free of bugs(still even world class programmers are prone to bugs) and solves even corner cases.There are subtle differences between the words CODER and DEVELOPER. There are basically two different aspects that make up a good developer. One(the most important one), is your analytical skills or call it Problem solving skills and the second one being your style,methodology of developing code. A coder should have great analytical skills but not necessarily good style or methodology of developing. But on the other hand a good developer must possess each of the above mentioned. It is indeed your thing to decide how your skill set look like.
For me(like most college grads), when i was in college, I personally loved to be a coder rather than a developer. Now of course I would die to a be good developer rather than a plain coder. The best way to look at it is something like this : Until pre-final year aspire to be a coder and once you get out of the shell better be a developer and not a plain coder. A developer must have good awareness in technology that he/she develops primarily on. For ex., I had no good knowledge in any of the technologies when i was in college except for one or two. And now I am atleast trying to get a good knowledge in technology i work predominantly on(Managed code). When you are in college the code that you write may be used utmost by you or your project mates.But imagine developing a product that is used by half of the globe. Certainly a coder cannot shine in this space unless he/she learns nice methods and standards of developing code.
Some straight forward tips to cultivate good developing practices when you are in college.

1.Write utility classes for almost anything that you can and circulate it to your friends for usage and get their feedback and incorporate any valid suggestions.

2.Save your classes in your system and maintain them as repository since you can use them when you need.(I used to write some classes in Php and post it in a community website for php where they will save it and display it for use for other users).

3.Try using technologies like java , .net , server side scripting etc(That will expose you to commonly used technologies).

4.If you have the habit of developing code in your leisure time then practise new things like how to trace your application,doing error logging for your application etc.

Above of all,
(Notice the bullet number)
0. Improve your problem solving skills by consistently solving problems , practising code on paper or even mind :). Interact with analytically strong people, read technical blogs that talk about problem solving and show great interest,attitude for solving problems.

Thats all I had in mind for this post. Happy coding...!!!