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 communicate as a developer.
Choose a Style
We should adjust our communication to the audience. Not everyone wants to take in information the same way.
Some people want lots of detail and some want to stick to the point.
People want to read long reports and some want simple memos.
Therefore, we should adjust to their style so that people listening to us and reading our things will have a better time to understand our information.
Present Our Message Nicely
We have to present our message nicely so that we can convey them to our audience in a way that they’re happy with.
We shouldn’t only focus on written communication. Verbal communication is also important.
If we’re writing written documents, we should make the nicely formatted.
If we can’t make them nice ourselves, we can use templates to help us make them look nicer.
Also, we have to check the spelling and grammar of our work before presenting it to our audience. This way, we won’t embarrass ourselves with such mistakes.
Involve Our Audience
When we’re presenting something, we should engage our audience by getting feedback and pick their brains so that we can improve on our work.
This way, we can produce a better document than if we just write the whole thing ourselves without consulting anyone.
Be a Listener
We got to listen to people so that we can get their views on things.
Also, if we listen to people, then they’ll listen to us.
Therefore, we should encourage people to talk by asking questions or have them summarize what we tell them to make sure that they got what we said.
This will make getting our point across more effectively and learn something.
Reply to People
When we get a message, we should reply to them. It’s impolite to make people wait a long for an answer and it’s even worse if we just ignore them.
Therefore, we should always respond to messages and emails and check our notifications often.
Email Communication
Being careful with our email communication will save us. We should proofread before we send so that we won’t send out messages with typos or wrong information.
Also, we should check the recipient to see if it’s the right person or people before sending it.
This is especially important if the email has sensitive information.
Also, we should check the spelling of our emails to make sure that everything is right.
The formatting should be simple so that people with any email client can read them clearly.
If we use rich text or HTML emails, then we should make sure that all recipients can read them properly.
Quoting things should be kept to a minimum so that we won’t have to read everyone’s quotes.
If we do quote, then we should attribute the quote to the person that wrote the quote.
Flaming is always wrong. We should be polite even if we’re sending emails.
Also, we should organize our emails so that we only see the important stuff. The rest can be archived.
Sketch Boards and Storyboards
Diagrams are always good. We can put them on whiteboards, documents, messages, etc to convey what we want other people to know.
A picture is worth a thousand words, so one diagram can replace a thousand words.
Most people just understand diagrams better than a wall of text.
We can draw stuff with markers on whiteboards or we can do the same with virtual whiteboards and make things nice.
This way, everyone can explore ideas and make discussions easier than just talking and writing out words.
Flowcharts
To discuss workflow related things, flowcharts are always great. We can draw them or we can use a program to create them.
There’re many programs that let us create flowcharts to outline the workflows of our programs.
The symbols on a flowchart are standard so many people will know what they mean.
Therefore we should use them and save us from taking lots of time explaining things.
Conclusion
When we communicate with email, we should think about who to send it to and check for typos.
Also, we should draw diagrams instead of writing out lots of words to explain something.
It just saves us lots of time from doing things that we don’t have do to communicate the same thing.
