3 Non-obvious Skills for Programmers

In this video I'm sharing 3 skills that I believe are not appreciated enough among programmers and which can help a lot in becoming a better developer

• good memory
• attention to details
• thinking a few steps ahead

Contact:

✉️ email - [e-mail]

🐦 Twitter - @gregorywitek

📚 Resources

• https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Joshua-Foer/Moonwalking-with-Einstein--The-Art-and-Science-of-Remembering-Everything/11234581- "Moonwalking with Einstein - a very interesting book which proves that memory can be trained, and a fun story to read
• https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-memory
• https://www.health.harvard.edu/aging/4-tricks-to-rev-up-your-memory
• https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/regular-exercise-adds-up-to-big-memory-boosts

Notes

Intro

• good memory, attention to details, long-term vision
• 3 things that helped me become a much better programmer
• also curiosity, and writing, and... ok, let's stop at 3 today
• now they also help me to become better manager

Good memory

• I was told memory is not necessary anymore
• memory has a rather bad reputation
• it is related to memorizing, which we all had to do at school and what most of us hated
• as a kid I was told that computers will let us find anything, so good memory is overrated
• Google does not replace memory
• you don't need to memorize all the standard library functions in PHP, remembering the ones you use regularly is enough
• finding something online takes time
• it's not a lot of time
• bet repeated many times might be a lot of time
• sometimes there's no time to search
• during meetings or other conversations
• good memory helps besides coding
• remembering names of people in your company (and how to pronounce them correctly)
• it helps building relations
• remembering past decisions and reasons behind them
• you don't need to remember everything
• remembering algorithms is absolutely useless except for interviewing at companies which rely on remembering algorithms
• you can write stuff down (I take a lot of notes and try to go back to them in the future)
• use git commit messages and documentation to write down notes about the code

Practice

• practicing recall technique
• make notes, review the notes, recall the notes
• learning things that will be used
• e.g. learn and practice a new spoken language
• it's like a muscle, the more you practice, the easier it gets to remember new things

Attention to details

• I think this is one of the things that separate average developers from good developers
• good developers immediately notice things that others miss
• the reason is that in programming even one character, one typo can break everything
• of course there are tests etc, but attention to detail goes way beyond that
• thinking of edge cases is attention to detail
• good developers ask questions like "and what happens when ... ?"
• paying attention to user experience before implementation helps in reducing the time to getting feature done

Thinking ahead

• maybe the most important on the list
• especially important for lead devs and up, but helpful on every level
• often when I see some code that does not look good, I want to change it
• but then I don't have time to do that at once
• so what I do is imagine how this code would look like if I had more time
• then I imagine how to get these
• and then I implement first step and over time I get to the state that I'm happy with
• this helps also with planning projects
• also with strategy for future development
• the questions to ask are
• where do we want to be
• how do we get there one step at a time
• example: I want to move our front-end from Angular to React
• we might use micro front-ends approach
• we might rewrite it all at once
• we might run both apps together and add a layer of communication between them
• each of these will take weeks if not months
• so we need to know what is our goal and define steps to get there
• the same might apply on a lower level
• I have 10 classes that look almost the same
• today I'll extract common part and I'll move 2 out of 10 classes to use the common class
• later I'll be moving remaining classes whenever I have a chance

Comments

[Kevin Truong]

Great video and tips Gregory. Couldn't agree more with the "attention to details" skill because it does play well into thinking of the future. Applies to so much more beyond coding and into every day life!

[Gregory Witek]

Thanks, Kevin! Yes, you're absolutely right, attention to details is kind of an entry point here - the more things you notice, the more future scenarios you can think of, the better you can prepare in advance