I think, if you want to be the hero in a coding project, you should:
- Never keep your knowledge to yourself, but share your ideas with everyone early on
- Be motivative
- Be on time
- Do not use excuses when things do not work out on your end. Work on a solution instead
- Keep things productive (for ex. try to stop finger-pointing)
- Have a clearly structured work and document all your stuff
- Keep to standards at all times
- Take time to talk to your team about how you do stuff and why you do it that particular way. Take criticism as constructive ideas to improve your work
- Learn. Learn even more. Be the most knowledgeable of them all. But don't brag about it; keep it to yourself and help the others out
- If you do not use agile development methods, try to implement some non-intrusive ones; except if you are the one responsible for the project organization - then be more aggressive about it and find out how you can boost productivity (for ex. (stand-up) meetings with the other developers during which you discuss what you did and what you will do next; use Kanban cards in order to distribute tasks,...)
- Categorize tasks (see this link)
But the most important of them all might be:

This list is not complete!