Basic good practices

I've been kinda busy lately doing a lot of refactoring, I hope to be back to post about C# interesting things like generics and patterns soon

meanwhile, I've been catching up reading my blogs, I got to this post from Jeremy Miller, "The Will to be good", there are a few points that I have always taken to heart:

1. Don't tolerate bad code. 
2. Don't write code on top of bad code.
3. Fix a broken build
4. The "design hat" never comes off.
5. Does quality even matter?. Absolutely

For me these things are more basic than even testing, if you follow these simple guidelines your tests will run smoothly

I don't tolerate bad code and/or developers who write sloppy code, I don't even tolerate to have warnings in my code

You will always find people in some teams who are not very good at these basic things (and I'm not talking about my current team, in case they are reading this), and you have to learn how to deal with these people, if you are the team lead that's part of your job, you have to show them better techniques, even though I know is hard, specially if you are younger than them; if you are not the team lead it gets even harder, but all you can do is be an example, if you follow those practices you will be a better developer than one that doesn't, and people will see that and start listening to you at some point.

Managers may get scared when they hear you are refactoring like mad, but that shouldn't stop you from doing so (you might even have to do it after work hours), after all you are just making life easier for you and your team