To be a good programmer, we should follow some easy to adopt habits to keep our programming career long-lasting.
In this article, we’ll look at better ways to learn, communicate and think like a developer.
Seizing Opportunities for Learning
Taking on personal challenges to find answers is the key to success.
There’s no better way to learn by challenging ourselves and practicing to solve problems.
The web is out there and we can search it with our fingertips.
Also, we can go the traditional route and visit the library if we like physical books.
In addition to reading books, we got to practice what’s mentioned in books or whatever material we’re looking at. This way, whatever we learn will actually stay in our minds.
There’s just a no better way to become better than by learning by getting our hands dirty and challenging ourselves.
The tough challenges are what we remember the most.
Critical Thinking
Even though books and online materials are good, we got to be mindful that not everything in books and online is good or correct.
Therefore, we should keep an open mind and think through everything before accepting whatever is in them is the right answer.
In addition, we should keep in mind that lots of things are commercialized. People that can pay for ads can put their results on top or have a bigger space than other entries in a search engine.
We should keep that in mind so that we can think about them before accepting whatever is presented.
What we read and hear aren’t always truthful or correct. Content on social media and websites are often biased or misleading, for example.
Therefore, we should think about those carefully as well.
When we see or hear something, we should as specific questions.
Then we should look for answers to the questions we raised.
We can then ask those questions privately or publically depending on our preference.
Communicate
Communicating is very important. We got to keep people up to date on what we’re doing so that we won’t step on each other’s toes.
Also, we have to clarify the requirements of what we’re working on so that we can do them properly.
Our code is also a way that we communicate. It’s communicating by explaining what we’re trying to do by listing out the operations that we’re trying to do to implement some features.
We write proposals and memos to make suggestions for solving different problems and advocate for ideas.
Since we have to communicate to get anything done as a team, we got to do this well.
We got to know to say when we’re communicating. We got to think before saying or writing anything.
Technical documents should be planned our be writing. Make sure that we didn’t miss anything in our documents so that people reading them won’t miss what we’re trying to convey.
Know Our Audience
We got to write and say things that target the audience that we’re communicating to.
For instance, we would communicate differently if we’re communicating with a technical or non-technical audience.
This way, people actually understand what we’re saying when we tell them something.
This is the same for writing. It’s not just about saying what we thinking we want to say, we also have to make sure that we have to know our audience so that they’ll understand what we’re saying or writing.
Choose Our Moment to Convey Our Message
Choosing an appropriate time to say something is important.
It’s best to choose a time when people are focusing on work to talk about work stuff for example.
No one wants to talk about non-urgent work things when they’re off. They all want a break.
We should just make sure that people that are listening to us actually want to hear what we’re saying.
Conclusion
Communication is pretty important since most of us are working on a team. We got to our best to communicate so we won’t run into issues with miscommunication later on.
Also, we should take the best moment to communicate our message.
Finally, we should take everything at face value. No matter what we hear or see, we should think about them before accepting them.
We should ask questions whenever we can.
