Being a developer is hard. Not only do we have to know technical skills, but we also have lots of soft skills that we’ve to get good at.
In this article, we’ll look at the ways that we can get better as developers.
Reassess Our Workflow
Reassessing our workflow often helps us find better ways to work. We should adopt them to the situation to suit our needs in the short term.
Working From Home
Working from home takes discipline. We got to do the work by removing temptations and distractions like televisions, social media, and many other things that can distract us at home.
This may be hard. But it’ll definitely help us to get things done at home, which helps us survive in our jobs or if we’re working for ourselves.
Code for Accessibility
When we’re writing our code, we should be considerate of users that may not be able to do all the things that healthy people can do.
Therefore, we should think about accessibility when we’re writing our code so that they can enjoy our production the same way that anyone else can do.
Honor Our Commitments
If we commit to something then we should deliver them by the date we committed to.
Otherwise, if we fall behind, we should update everyone so that they’ll all adjust their expectations.
Be Proactive
Helping others when we have time is always a good idea. They’ll all be thankful if we help them.
Build a Portfolio and Online Presence
A portfolio is a great way to promote ourselves. We may not need it now, but it can get us extra opportunities if we don’t need them and if we need to get a new job, then they’ll help us even more.
Also, we should all have a public online persona so that people know that we exist on the Internet.
Today’s world isn’t just confined to where we live, and opportunities can come from anywhere.
Therefore, we should take advantage of that so that we can get opportunities wherever they’re from.
Remember Why We Love Programming
We got to remember whey we love programming so that we don’t get discouraged when we’re going through tough times.
Take a break if we’re building negative feelings. We got to think as to why we got into programming in the first place so we can reignite our passion.
Share Our Knowledge
Sharing our knowledge anywhere including meetups, conferences and online are a great idea.
Teaching our knowledge help others so they can share it with others. It doesn’t only help the people we’re directly teaching, but a lot more other people that the people we taught are teaching.
Recognize Our Weaknesses
We should recognize our weaknesses so that we can learn things to improve our weaknesses.
It’s important that we improve them so that we get better in the future.
Thinking about The Big Picture
Thinking about the big picture is always needed. Most systems that people use are big so that we have to know about the big picture even though we only work on a part of it.
There’re are a few parts that we have to think of to build the big picture. There’s the business side which we have to meet the needs of.
There’s the users’ side which actually provides the features that users need.
Then there’s the technology which we use to build the whole solution. We have to know how each part interacts so that we can work with them easily.
Develop Quickly
We got to able to create the correct code quickly so that we can deliver our stuff. This got to come with experience.
Every code base is different so that when we move on to a new company, we got to learn everything from scratch again about their codebase so we can develop quickly again.
Find the Ideal Solution
The ideal solution should be found before coding. We got to think from the users’ perspective and all the ways that our solutions could fail.
We probably need another person to help us find our flaws if the feature is complex.
Conclusion
We got to think about the user and stakeholder when we’re writing. This means that we should honor our commits and update them if we can’t.
Also, we should get the big picture so our solutions won’t do things that are unintentional.
Finally, when times are tough, we should remind ourselves whey we like programming.
