As a software developer, it's important to focus on developing both technical and interpersonal skills. While technical (hard) skills are necessary to succeed in the industry, soft skills (such as communication, collaboration, and teamwork) are equally important.
Everyone has a unique strength, point of view, or way of approaching their work that helps them stand out: maybe it’s curiosity, adaptability, or maybe it’s your innate contrariness, which enables you to poke holes in weak code. 😠🤔 Once you identify and begin to develop that unique attribute, you can use it for good and continue to refine it as you progress in your career.
What do you consider to be your greatest strength as a developer, and how has it helped you in your work?
Latest comments (20)
My ability to learn new things quickly and put that knowledge into practice is definitely above average. Learning a completely new stack or technology to build a new project doesn't really slow me down very much. My friends have let me know that I'm an anomaly. Lol
I love code. So so so so much. I don't think everyone needs to love code as much as me, but it's definitely been a force multiplier for my career. I don't mind learning about code because I love it. I don't mind helping other people with code because I love it. I don't mind doing side projects on my own time to learn new technologies or programming languages because (guess what) I love it. ❤️
Tenacity
And debugging...
I have huge interest in RTEs(like ProseMirror/Tiptap/Lexical) which has landed me great opportunities through my contributions to those ecosystems.
It's not really unique, but I feel my biggest strength is being able and willing to dig deep into things and understand them independently.
I notice a lot of other developers, when they start working in a new codebase, they'll find people who know more about it and ask them a bunch of questions.
On the other hand I just go and read the code, put in breakpoints and step through it, and refactor the parts I don't understand until I understand them. I will ask others when I'm really stumped or if I want to know something that the code alone can't really answer, but my threshold for that is pretty high.
Because of these traits, I can onboard onto new projects without using a lot of other developers' time. Also by digging through the code to find answers, I think I learn more than I would have if I had just asked someone.
It might sound like by learning things "the hard way", I would be slower, at least at the start, but I haven't really found that to be the case.
Because of these habits I feel I have an unusually wide understanding of our codebases, and hardly a day goes by without other developers DMing me questions about stuff!
I never give up.
I use a debugger.
I'm consistent, and I have patience when fixing bugs.
The ability to appear like I am listening to the manager. 😁
On a more serious note, I think my greatest strength is that I dont have a greatest strength... Im one of those people who is good at a lot of things, but doesnt excel at anything. I am not sure if it is a strength or a weakness though... Todays society is all about excelling at what you do :(
I can tell "no"
Thinking outside the box (maybe a little too far outside sometimes!)
Am Software Freestyle Engineer, what you expect? That's The Greatest Unique Strength and Weird I A M
Being able to read and understand other people's code. Get thrown into a new environment, existing stack, existing setups and figuring it out and making it work so i can modify it.
And then being able to track down and fix bugs without breaking the rest of the system [which is the hardest part]
Technically, I guess a mix of deep "bisect thinking" as a proven solution pattern to solve anything (some scientific background helped here), being able to write code as little and isolated as possible to save the burden of cognitive load and just shear knowledge of the stuff I use regularly. You can hone any of those with practice by the way, it's not magic.
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