Not Only Code
3 Non-obvious Skills for Programmers

3 Non-obvious Skills for Programmers

Gregory Witek's photo
Gregory Witek
·

4 min read

Featured on Hashnode

In this video I'm sharing 3 skills that I believe are not appreciated enough among programmers and which can help a lot in becoming a better developer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UPx9UAQKboc
  • good memory
  • attention to details
  • thinking a few steps ahead

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Notes

Intro

  • good memory, attention to details, long-term vision
  • 3 things that helped me become a much better programmer
  • also curiosity, and writing, and... ok, let's stop at 3 today
  • now they also help me to become better manager

Good memory

  • I was told memory is not necessary anymore
  • memory has a rather bad reputation
  • it is related to memorizing, which we all had to do at school and what most of us hated
  • as a kid I was told that computers will let us find anything, so good memory is overrated
  • Google does not replace memory
  • you don't need to memorize all the standard library functions in PHP, remembering the ones you use regularly is enough
  • finding something online takes time
  • it's not a lot of time
  • but repeated many times might be a lot of time
  • sometimes there's no time to search
  • during meetings or other conversations
  • good memory helps besides coding
  • remembering names of people in your company (and how to pronounce them correctly)
  • it helps building relations
  • remembering past decisions and reasons behind them
  • you don't need to remember everything
  • remembering algorithms is absolutely useless except for interviewing at companies which rely on remembering algorithms
  • you can write stuff down (I take a lot of notes and try to go back to them in the future)
  • use git commit messages and documentation to write down notes about the code

Practice

  • practicing recall technique
  • make notes, review the notes, recall the notes
  • learning things that will be used
  • e.g. learn and practice a new spoken language
  • it's like a muscle, the more you practice, the easier it gets to remember new things

Attention to details

  • I think this is one of the things that separate average developers from good developers
  • good developers immediately notice things that others miss
  • the reason is that in programming even one character, one typo can break everything
  • of course there are tests etc, but attention to detail goes way beyond that
  • thinking of edge cases is attention to detail
  • good developers ask questions like "and what happens when ... ?"
  • paying attention to user experience before implementation helps in reducing the time to getting feature done

Thinking ahead

  • maybe the most important on the list
  • especially important for lead devs and up, but helpful on every level
  • often when I see some code that does not look good, I want to change it
  • but then I don't have time to do that at once
  • so what I do is imagine how this code would look like if I had more time
  • then I imagine how to get these
  • and then I implement first step and over time I get to the state that I'm happy with
  • this helps also with planning projects
  • also with strategy for future development
  • the questions to ask are
  • where do we want to be
  • how do we get there one step at a time
  • example: I want to move our front-end from Angular to React
  • we might use micro front-ends approach
  • we might rewrite it all at once
  • we might run both apps together and add a layer of communication between them
  • each of these will take weeks if not months
  • so we need to know what is our goal and define steps to get there
  • the same might apply on a lower level
  • I have 10 classes that look almost the same
  • today I'll extract common part and I'll move 2 out of 10 classes to use the common class
  • later I'll be moving remaining classes whenever I have a chance
ProductivityGeneral AdviceskillsGeneral Programming