These are some of the most underrated skills that most aspiring developers tend to ignore. In my opinion, these skills make you efficient and help you keep your sanity in chaos.
000. Touch Typing
Hands down one of the most underrated skill developers ignore is touch typing. Most schools in India do not teach touch typing and developers think this is a skill which can be ignored. You look at the keyboard for typing and then check the monitor to read back if everything is okay, you still are going to skip an extra semicolon somewhere. You use up twice as time and constant head/neck movement back and forth.
Touch typing will allow you to have a stable posture, you read what you are typing on the go, avoid MOST of the syntax errors on runtime, and you search and code faster. You expend less energy and get more work done.
001. Communication
First step in good communication is to Listen well and Listen carefully. I am not talking about your command on a spoken language. I am talking about your ability to comprehend and express. This, if not done right, will create gaps and lapses in understanding eventually leading to hours of rework and refactoring.
A developer interacts with not just other developers, they also may need to interact with functional and business users. If a developer can translate marketing initiatives to technical specifications effectively and precisely as expected, then rolling out features through sprints becomes a lot easier and faster. Everyone’s happy.
010. Organising
Maintain a diary, use tools to assist yourself remember things and free up that extra space and bandwidth. If you plan your tasks, you will be able to set order of priority, map dependencies, and most importantly pre-emptively track all pre-requisites. Free up your brain from everything and anything that can be managed using tools, trackers, reminders etc.
Invest that extra 30 mins in freeing up 5mins in one activity that you may have to recursively do 100 times during the course of the entire project.
011. Product Oriented
Be a user first, developer later. You have used hundreds of applications, you know what you like and what you don’t like. Put that experience to use in your own work. If something is counter intuitive, then speak up. Talk to your team members, gain perspective of why you are doing what you are doing.
Lines of code comes to life when someone is happily and effortlessly using it.
100. Fear No Gorilla
Right balance of confidence and humility will fuel your gas tank for life. Don’t be bothered by number of attempts to get something right. Don’t be afraid of challenges. Push harder, follow through, and most importantly, enjoy while you are at it. Believe in your ability to find answers, until then, Fear No Goddamn Gorilla.
Comment if you are able to figure out the number sequence of the above points.
If you are a developer, and need any guidance, feel free to reach out to me.
Peace!