What is your best skill as a developer?
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Posted on Mar 18
What is your best skill as a developer?
Whether it is a specific enough technical expertise, or just part of the craft you do well?
Discussion (74)
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Creating problems. Sure, I could say that problem solving is my best skill (and it probably is), but the fact is I also create problems by developing tech that then needs to be maintained, fine-tuned, updated, rewritten, replaced, re-thought. There are a few thousand lines of C# and JavaScript processing sales leads for two car-sales companies. I listened, thought, developed but now I'm stuck with a fairly constant regime of maintain, fine-tune, update that I can't get away from. So maybe my best skills as a developer are dogged persistence and faithfulness to the product.
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Starts out with "creating problems" and finishes with "dogged persistence". Add "pivoting while marketing self" to your skills list too :P
I feel that though. You create a cool utility or tool and now it's your child.
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Whats that old saying, Gotta break a few million itterations to make a program
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My ability to relax and stop working
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Well, I would often start rocking on the chair relaxing, thinking solutions without putting any pressure or let fear of completing things on time take over. This worked really well in most cases but did disturbed others and few asked what are you so relaxed about? Why are you rocking and spinning on the the chair for?
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Honestly, get out doors that's the best way to solve problems, I used to do my best work on the way home
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I will try it, I guess other than laziness there's no excuse to just take a short walk. Some problem requires attending to and some are solved in mind, with that distinction I would say I could definitely use going for a short walk for problem solved using mind alone.
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Hahahahaha ! The most important thing of all!
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I used to want to be the very best frontend developer, like a Pokémon trainer. I had to catch them all, but now I just want to chill and enjoy hobbies, play with my son and be a smarter developer not work harder
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You are the real human, peace
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Not taking bullshit.
Shit roles down hill in software. I don't let bullshit politics or cocky non-technical management affect me.
It's really the soft skills that matter in the long run. Code is easy, people are difficult.
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Awesome comment. Couldn't agree more.
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Yup, I aggree did experince something similar and I did not take it, not well atleast. LOL. Wanna share a few experinces... don't need to go into details.
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Writing documentation is probably the thing that stands out above some of my other skills.
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I would love to read a blog post by you going over better documentation skills as a new developer! It doesn't get talked about enough and there seems to be no clear cut way of how one should go about writing it. ✨
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That's something I hadn't considered, but am now considering.
Perhaps there's something to glean from my posts tagged with documentation? takeonrules.com/tags/documentation/
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omgoodness what a collection! Thank you!
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Thank you for prompting me.
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I think listening and knowing the right questions to ask (so we can get to a better problem definition) is probably my super power. I would probably add documentation/blogging and simplifying the complex as probably other things I think I am pretty good at.
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Not estimating, and ignoring deadlines
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Some deadlines go away on thier own and some things cannot be known :) devils advocate here
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I think depending on the situation and opportunity at hand, my best skills are: Solving problems from scratch, i.e. greenfield projects.
But then at the other end of the spectrum, I fancy myself a really good debugger.
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I'd love to see a post from you about your top considerations for greenfield projects!
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Abstracting complex things and explaining it the easy way.
Also adapting to change and new technologies I guess.
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My best skill would be to break down hard-to-understand technical concepts in a way that makes sense for junior developers & even non-tech folks.
Probably the reason why I could transition from a pure software engineering role to DevRel! 😎
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Understanding Dinosaurs and combing spaghetti. My life since 2019.
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Wow. Such nice way of describing it. Love that.
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Communication.
Understanding that the same word, in the same context, but used by a different person, can mean completely different things.
Understanding that I may not understand the full context of a technical tool or a person's perspective, and knowing what questions to ask to get there (sometimes that very question is, "What are the best questions to ask?").
Understanding that sometimes concepts are not complex, they're just hidden behind a bunch of domain-specific vocabulary. More than that, I make these kinds of concepts more accessible to others.
This is how I got into tech without a CS degree, and this is how I'll stay in it.
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Resourcefulness, Quick Learning & Catching on to new code base quickly by fearless experimentation, let the git worry about things unrelated.
No harm will come as long as I dont create a exprimentation branch and start creating PR from that to be merged to dev, because then I would be in trouble.
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Self-learning and self-seeking
This skill helped me a lot with fear. I don't mind getting down and dirty with new codebases because I just know that whatever happens, I'll always be able to find the answers I need even if it takes a bit of time.
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Being goot at math.
I actually graduated in Mathematics and became a developer by chance. But when it comes to those seldom problems that deal with abstraction, generalization, visualization and figuring out how things work from a bunch of data I feel like I have an edge over my colleagues.
It's not something that's always necessary, but it's good to have in a team, and I think it helped me improving some other developer skills.
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This is a great articulation of math.
I too have a degree in math, yet I rarely use algebra or calculus for programming. Instead its all about abstractions (and sets).
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Not a hard skill, but I feel like I'm good at over-communicating with my team. It's about consistency.
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Intuitive problem solving. Makes it harder to explain how I arrive at a solution, but is otherwise a helpful skill.
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Critical thinking, lean coding
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I think adapatability.
I started my professional career doing .NET in financial services, now I'm writing realtime OS code for medical devices, and I've done a bunch of stuff in between. I'll pick up whatever and run with it.
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I'm kinda passable at creating solutions, but once I have them, I'm really good at making up a corresponding problem.
Jokes aside, I'd say I'm kind of okay-ish at building abstractions with heavy metaprogramming.
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Analogizing technical topics. Besides creating a common ground for everyone in the room, it's occasionally fun and colorful to talk about how Kirk delivers mail to Carol's army of clones (aka Kafka and consumer groups).
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By far, it's my dedication to writing. I've found that the more I write, the more I learn. And from that corpus of knowledge, novel connections emerge. I think I "see" more things now than I did before I wrote with such devotion.
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I'm RPA developer, using Python were standart language. I build automation and inovation for a enterprise where I work, using various librarys/frameworks in Python: Sellenium, Pandas, Mathplotlib, Tabula, etc. I make improvements in the company's internal processes, makes the boss much richer hahahaha :')
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Skill? Creativity. Whether working on an original program. (And, we all know that coding a new program is often a thing of art. : )
Or troubleshooting and updating an existing program that's out there by another coder.
It comes down to creativity. Ability to think out of the box. Be flexible. This leads me back to keeping a creative mindset to be successful.
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the ability of Zooming In and Out, meaning:
- reduce the scope and focus on details when it comes to implement tiny simple effective methods with single responsibility (and all other solid principles) and be able to unit test and debug "surgically".
- move away from those lines of code and get an eagle eye view, understand the big picture, the context where your piece of code works.
and while zooming in and out, be creative and bold and challenge the status quo, pointing out flaws and suggesting solutions or improvements
too often we put ourselves in a cage and implement crazy complicated solutions only because we did not ask the developer close to us (working on same feature but different subtask) to change the return value of the method they are implementing...
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Debugging, fixing, and optimizing existing code.
I am far, far better at finding and fixing the bug, optimizing a nonperformant application or piece of one, or tackling a pile of tangled code spaghetti and turning it into a saucy code tapestry than I am at building even the simplest of applications in the greenfield and from scratch.
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Communication and analysis - don't jump into coding right away, understand the problem first, ask questions!
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Beautifying and organizing code and documentation are my favorite sub-task in developing!
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Sub- tasking.. I always try to focus on how to reduce a task to about a unit time...
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Responsive website design
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Being calm in high pressure situations ✌️
Althrought I'm not as good as I think
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I ask questions, a lot of questions
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Sharing whatever cool thing I learn with the team
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My love for learning! In development there is always something new to keep am eye on or to better yourself somehow!
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Learning fast as soft skill and Typescript
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debug and find the problems about a bug
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Process automation and leveraging existing tools in a way they weren’t necessary designed to in order to gain an edge.
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not sure that's really a skill but I'm perfectly honest when I don't know smth or when the solution is unclear at some point.
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I am in best of my learning skill
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Pretend to be a non-technical user and see the product from his point of view
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To make my way rather than to find one when attempting to solve a problem
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Thinking and write thought as fluent as code.
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A better question is "What do other people on your team think your best skill is?"
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Listening and then asking questions to find out what clients / people actually want.
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Or just place code that spies them and tell you what client wants.
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Guess having learnt how to learn.
Uh, no, it's having learnt how to say "no"
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Solve problems, I dont know how explain, but I have creative ideas to solve problems haha (sometimes a kludge '-' )
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I think Watching Tutorial :D .Just kidding-
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Collaborating with different kinds of developers, we're in the people business where our main tool is technology, not the way around :)
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I guess Javascript. It is the only language I am most comfortable with.
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