DEV Community

Cover image for What is your best skill as a developer?
Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern Subscriber

Posted on

What is your best skill as a developer?

Whether it is a specific enough technical expertise, or just part of the craft you do well?

Oldest comments (98)

Collapse
 
sherrydays profile image
Sherry Day

Writing documentation is probably the thing that stands out above some of my other skills.

Collapse
 
valenciawhite profile image
Valencia White

I would love to read a blog post by you going over better documentation skills as a new developer! It doesn't get talked about enough and there seems to be no clear cut way of how one should go about writing it. โœจ

Collapse
 
darkwiiplayer profile image
๐’ŽWii ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ • Edited

meanwhile, the documentation I write is just ๐Ÿคข๐Ÿคฎ

Collapse
 
dinerdas profile image
Diner Das

Not a hard skill, but I feel like I'm good at over-communicating with my team. It's about consistency.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I think depending on the situation and opportunity at hand, my best skills are: Solving problems from scratch, i.e. greenfield projects.

But then at the other end of the spectrum, I fancy myself a really good debugger.

Collapse
 
cerchie profile image
Lucia Cerchie

I'd love to see a post from you about your top considerations for greenfield projects!

Collapse
 
094459 profile image
Ricardo Sueiras

I think listening and knowing the right questions to ask (so we can get to a better problem definition) is probably my super power. I would probably add documentation/blogging and simplifying the complex as probably other things I think I am pretty good at.

Collapse
 
harsvnc profile image
Hrn Svncใƒใƒซใƒณ

Abstracting complex things and explaining it the easy way.
Also adapting to change and new technologies I guess.

Collapse
 
bugmagnet profile image
Bruce Axtens • Edited

Creating problems. Sure, I could say that problem solving is my best skill (and it probably is), but the fact is I also create problems by developing tech that then needs to be maintained, fine-tuned, updated, rewritten, replaced, re-thought. There are a few thousand lines of C# and JavaScript processing sales leads for two car-sales companies. I listened, thought, developed but now I'm stuck with a fairly constant regime of maintain, fine-tune, update that I can't get away from. So maybe my best skills as a developer are dogged persistence and faithfulness to the product.

Collapse
 
marissab profile image
Marissa B

Starts out with "creating problems" and finishes with "dogged persistence". Add "pivoting while marketing self" to your skills list too :P

I feel that though. You create a cool utility or tool and now it's your child.

Collapse
 
atulcodex profile image
๐Ÿšฉ Atul Prajapati ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

nice

Collapse
 
adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

Whats that old saying, Gotta break a few million itterations to make a program

Collapse
 
jonrandy profile image
Jon Randy ๐ŸŽ–๏ธ

Not estimating, and ignoring deadlines

Collapse
 
adam_cyclones profile image
Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

Some deadlines go away on thier own and some things cannot be known :) devils advocate here

Collapse
 
mrpaulishaili profile image
Paul C. Ishaili

Critical thinking, lean coding

Collapse
 
rubinelezi profile image
Rubin Elezi

Debugging

Collapse
 
rawalprashant profile image
Prashant Raval

I am in best of my learning skill

Some comments may only be visible to logged-in visitors. Sign in to view all comments.