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Ben Halpern
Ben Halpern

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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?

Top comments (102)

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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.

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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.

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๐Ÿšฉ Atul Prajapati ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

nice

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

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

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

My ability to relax and stop working

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Sarthak Dwivedi • Edited

Well, I would often start rocking on the chair relaxing, thinking solutions without putting any pressure or let fear of completing things on time take over. This worked really well in most cases but did disturbed others and few asked what are you so relaxed about? Why are you rocking and spinning on the the chair for?

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

Honestly, get out doors that's the best way to solve problems, I used to do my best work on the way home

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Sarthak Dwivedi

I will try it, I guess other than laziness there's no excuse to just take a short walk. Some problem requires attending to and some are solved in mind, with that distinction I would say I could definitely use going for a short walk for problem solved using mind alone.

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๐Ÿšฉ Atul Prajapati ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ณ

You are the real human, peace

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

And to you Atul

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

ummm, I like to make responsive designs and till now I have created lots of plan for different software and tools to help our humanity.

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Pandademic

Hahahahaha ! The most important thing of all!

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

I used to want to be the very best frontend developer, like a Pokรฉmon trainer. I had to catch them all, but now I just want to chill and enjoy hobbies, play with my son and be a smarter developer not work harder

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Sherry Day

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

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๐’ŽWii ๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€โšง๏ธ • Edited

meanwhile, the documentation I write is just ๐Ÿคข๐Ÿคฎ

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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

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Jeremy Friesen

That's something I hadn't considered, but am now considering.

Perhaps there's something to glean from my posts tagged with documentation? takeonrules.com/tags/documentation/

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valenciawhite profile image
Valencia White

omgoodness what a collection! Thank you!

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Jeremy Friesen

Thank you for prompting me.

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Jon Randy ๐ŸŽ–๏ธ

Not estimating, and ignoring deadlines

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Adam Crockett ๐ŸŒ€

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

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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.

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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.

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Lucia Cerchie

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

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Hrn Svncใƒใƒซใƒณ

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

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Ashwin Hariharan

My best skill would be to break down hard-to-understand technical concepts in a way that makes sense for junior developers & even non-tech folks.

Probably the reason why I could transition from a pure software engineering role to DevRel! ๐Ÿ˜Ž

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Dimitrios Desyllas

Understanding Dinosaurs and combing spaghetti. My life since 2019.

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Davide de Paolis

Wow. Such nice way of describing it. Love that.

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Kristian Quirapas

Self-learning and self-seeking

This skill helped me a lot with fear. I don't mind getting down and dirty with new codebases because I just know that whatever happens, I'll always be able to find the answers I need even if it takes a bit of time.

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Jerome Hardaway

Empathy.

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Forest Hoffman

This. 100%.

I was looking for this exact comment, and thought I'd have to make it. I'm pleasantly surprised!

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Thomas Hansen

Forget about algorithms and data structures for one. I've been a software developer for 20+ years professionally, and I started coding when I was 9, implying I've got 39 years of software development experience in total - And the last time I needed "an algorithm" was in 2001 (partially a joke, but still seriously intended).

For instance, who cares about how to implement QuickSort, I've got List<t>.Sort, and why bother about binary tree structures when 99% of your work persists data in PostgreSQL (or something) ...?

Sure, understanding the theory behind algorithms and data structures is important, but vanishingly less and less important due to better abstractions, the same way most developers hardly know any CISC x86 assembly code these days.

My most valuable skill as a developer is composition, architecture and design. It's what makes my code readable, both by others, and by my self (6 months down the road). If you want to sum it up in one word, I'd choose "beauty" ...

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Sarthak Dwivedi

Resourcefulness, Quick Learning & Catching on to new code base quickly by fearless experimentation, let the git worry about things unrelated.

No harm will come as long as I dont create a exprimentation branch and start creating PR from that to be merged to dev, because then I would be in trouble.

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Alan Marinho

I'm RPA developer, using Python were standart language. I build automation and inovation for a enterprise where I work, using various librarys/frameworks in Python: Sellenium, Pandas, Mathplotlib, Tabula, etc. I make improvements in the company's internal processes, makes the boss much richer hahahaha :')

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Matt Ellen • Edited

I think adapatability.

I started my professional career doing .NET in financial services, now I'm writing realtime OS code for medical devices, and I've done a bunch of stuff in between. I'll pick up whatever and run with it.