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 - gregory@notonlycode.org

🐦 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