DEV Community: Raihan Taher

3 Qualities that will help you to become a good software developer

Raihan Taher — Sun, 21 Mar 2021 12:16:19 +0000

If you are a software developer and you really want to see some success in your career. You need to shape your behaviour a bit. Different professions need different type of skillsets and behaviours. For example a doctor needs to have a very good memory, a football player needs a very good physic and fitness. For a software developer I think the top three qualities are:

Able to sit down and concentrate for long hours.
Habit of reading.
Have patience.

Let me explain why I think these are the top 3 characteristics according to me.

Able to sit down and concentrate for long hours

When we see hackers or software developers in movies we think they just quickly write code and the magic happens. They need seconds or minutes to solve huge issues and hack systems. This is totally exaggerated. In reality software developers need to sit down for hours or even days to find proper solutions for an issue. Applications take months to get developed. There are a lot of thought processing, discussions, decision making, trial and error before a feature is released to production. Software developers have to do critical thinking to find a solution of a problem and find the most appropriate way to write the code so that it can be reliable, robust and maintainable. As software developers need to do critical thinking and find ways to solve problem it needs laser like focus to do it fast and error free. It's like connecting the dots and creating a mental model. If you get distracted or lose track of the dots, there are chances that you will take much more time or your solutions might not be the best. In this fast paced world, people are always excited and distracted. Our mind wanders even if it finds seconds of free time. Either it will ask you to open your favourite social media app or watch a video in youtube. This habit of restlessness makes it very difficult for a person to sit on a place and concentrate for longer hours. If you can sit for 2-4 hours and work on a piece of code to find a solution, you are most likely to progress a lot better instead of taking breaks after few minutes of work. As you need to re-organise your thoughts again before you get into the flow or zone. If you can develop this habit of sitting for long hours without getting bored or distracted and can focus on your work, you will be progressing very well in your work. You will achieve a lot in those few hours. That is why in my list this is my first and most important characteristics for a software developer.

Habit of reading

The more you read the more you know. As a software developer you need to understand how things work. You need to see how other software developers have solved a similar issue or what approach would be better for a particular type of problem. Knowing all these is not possible except reading. You need to read books, articles, code, documentation and even StackOverflow questions and answers. You need to read logs to find bugs and issues in your code. As you will be spending most of the time just looking at the screen, you can already understand that your eye should be collecting info which you need to process. This is what we call reading. The more you read, the more you will know. If you don't have reading habits, you might not be up to date with the technologies and surly that will effect your growth as a software developer. So reading is very important.

Have patience

Do you get anxious very easily? You can't keep your head cool when you are not able to process information? If that is the case, you need to work on your patience. Patience is super important in this profession. As you will be dealing with complicated problems and some of the information might not be easy to process for your mind. There is a high chance that you will feel the pressure. You will start to feel that your mind has shut downed and unable to work anymore. You will feel that it's an impossible problem to solve. But trust me, there is a way. You just need to keep your head cool and keep trying. You can't give up. You can't stop there! You might need to seek help from others, but make sure you have tried your level best for a limited amount of time to solve it by yourself. You must develop this mindset that initially the things might be difficult but overtime it will be under control. So having patience is very important for a software developer to succeed.

In my software development career I have tried my best to identify the behaviours of successful software developers and apply in my own life. So far I think these qualities are essential for a software developer to be successful.

** Photo by Lala Azizli on Unsplash

Habit Tracking: A process to build good habits

Raihan Taher — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 19:35:32 +0000

When I was a small kid my parents used to tell me to develop the habit of reading. I don't think at that age I really understood what a habit is! But I was surely getting this vibe, that reading something everyday is a good thing to do. Later on I also read some essays in my academic text book about "Good habits", why it is important to develop good habits and how it will make me successful in life. So throughout my life I had this feeling that good habits are important factors in shaping my life. I understood that If we are able to develop good habits in our day to day life, we will become more productive and achieve more success. But if we develop bad habits, we will end up having a bad unsuccessful life. I guess there is no need to prove this statement, right! We all know the importance of habit, but I doubt how many of us really put an effort to develop good habits following a process or a system.

Good habits are not something that will get developed in yourself naturally. You have to take actions to convert your good actions into good habits. Some good habits you already might have developed unconsciously, but it doesn’t mean that all the other good habits will also get developed without much thinking. If you try to analyze how you have developed those good habits, you will find out somehow you were exposed to those good actions and you started doing it repeatedly. Maybe the environment you were brought up in has an impact or maybe your family members or school have pushed you to do something which you continued to do for a long time and it became your habit. It might have happened unconsciously that time, but doesn’t mean it will always happen. Even if it happens somehow it might be too late for you to utilize it in full potential.

So identifying what habits you have, whether it's good or bad is important. Trust me! If you try to analyze your habits just observing a day or two you will come to know some unknown facts about you. You will see that you have some habits which could be harmful for your future and some habits are good that need more attention in your life. So identifying your habit is very important if you really want to shine in your life.

There could be habits that will grow yourself as a good person in general, there could be other habits that will help you to become more successful in your career. You need to adjust your habits whichever area you are most in need. So, first identifying your habits is an important task. Once you have identified your habits, it's time to think, what habits you want to keep and what you want to get rid of. Now how to develop good habits or how to get rid of bad habits is a very big topic and it's not possible for me to explain all the possible ways and systems we can use. I would recommend reading books on “habit” to find out all the mysteries and ways of developing good habits.

In this post, we are just going to discuss one tool or system that can be used to develop good habits. It’s called "Habit Tracking". It's actually a simple process but very effective for building habits. In this process what you will do is track one or more habits that you want to develop. I prefer by starting one or may be two habits at a time so that this process doesn't get overwhelmed. Once you will get habituated by this "habit tracking" system you can increase the number! I know, it’s a bit funny that "Habit tracking" is also kind of a habit, but it will be easy if you have an easy tracking system.

Anyways, so yes, pick a habit that you want to develop and start tracking that habit everyday. Don't track just in your mind! Because your mind will fool you and you will start losing track eventually. Better to use a mobile app unless you really carry a paper notebook with you all the time. There are many apps available for iPhone and Android phones. Spend some time and choose a simple one. You don't want to make this habit tracking process too complicated for you as this shouldn't put any pressure on your brain. What you want is just a simple app that you will open once or twice a day just to update your status. If you want you can also use your calendar app or a simple todo list app. Just keep it simple.

At first try to set the goal as small as possible, don't think about the end result. In this process we don't worry if we will end up developing the habit or not, what we care about is to do what we have set for everyday. If you are thinking about your ultimate goal behind developing this habit all the time, you will get frustrated very soon as habits don't form so easily.The results will take time to show up. So don't stress yourself, by setting an unrealistic goal. Set the minimal goal that is possible.

For example, you want to develop a habit of reading books. For that the ultimate vision of having this goal is surely to learn more continuously and improve your life accordingly. But this is a long process and there are no shortcuts for it. So what you need to do is read books everyday and make this reading an automatic process in your life. So starting small and getting happy when you have achieved your daily goal is good enough. You can set a daily goal of reading a book for 10 or 15 mins per day. It's not just reading a book for the sake of reading, but also to understand what you are reading and to grasp the information that you have read. The minimum time of reading shouldn't be such that it won't be valuable in your life. For example, reading a book for 2 minutes! I don't think the number of paragraphs you will read in 2 mins will give you enough insight that you can get benefited from. So at least try to choose a reasonably small amount that will be helpful and set as a daily goal.

Once you have set a goal, use some easy tool to keep track of the habit. You can use an app in your mobile, you can just put a mark in your physical/virtual calendar, you can cross out a bar in your notebook or whatever works for you to keep track. The point is you have some system which you will update once you have completed your that day's goal. First week or two might seem a bit difficult to follow or continue doing the action and keep track. But after a week or so, when you will see the progress, it will motivate you to continue and not break the streak. You will have that satisfaction putting your complete mark in the tracker. And by time you will enjoy the process of doing that task everyday and eventually that action will turn into your habit. Yes, there is no time frame that you should stick to declare that an action has become your habit! But slowly slowly you will see that doing that particular task is not feeling unnatural to you anymore and there is no friction while you do it. When a task becomes automatic and feels natural, that is considered a habit.

I have tried this “habit tracking” process and got benefit from it. If you really want to develop a good habit, you can try this as well. All the best!

** Photo by Blaz Photo at Unsplash