The one simple trick to do a better job as a programmer is to git commit as if your commit could be accidentally deployed (and it wouldn’t break the production environment…)

Why would this improve your work? Because it pushes for improvements in several areas.

If a commit needs to leave the project in a working state, you need to:

1. Be able to prove that after making your changes, the project is in a working state. This forces you to put automated tests in place.
2. Be able to make changes that don’t break existing code, or that only add new features. This forces you think about first improving the existing code design to allow for your change to happen.

To practice with the latter, I recommend learning about the Mikado method. It makes it easier to recognize prerequisites for the change you want to make, and then forces you to enable the real goals by implementing the prerequisites first.