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12 Essential Skills Software Developers should Learn in 2024

javinpaul on January 06, 2020

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exts profile image
Lamonte

VS Code while a great tool and editor with a powerful extension system, is not an IDE.

I think containers are important to know about, but not specifically docker. I personally find docker overly complicated. I still use vagrant for local development and it's much simpler.

Of all the things you listed since a lot of it is very dependent on what you're doing. Linux(unix), databases, and git I would say you should brush up on. If you're a software developer you should already be brushing up on basic programming topics and concepts such as oop and data structures.

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jsbeaulieu profile image
Jean-Sébastien Beaulieu

VS Code, for some languages, is most definitely an IDE. Refactoring tools, integrated debugger, code intelligence, source control client, remote interpreters, build/deploy tools, test runner, integrated terminal, support for linters/formatters, etc. Not sure how it doesn't qualify as an "Integrated Development Environment" at that point. Sounds quite integrated to me.

Vagrant is a VM provisioning tool, not a container runtime. Docker is the de-facto container standard for now, so yes, Docker specifically is definitely a thing to get familiar with.

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elabftw profile image
eLabFTW

Jupyter notebook is NOT an IDE! It's a very convenient tool to get started on a project or show how some library is working, but if you're writing serious python code you'll want a real editor (like vim :p).

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Or maybe PyCharm :-)

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stuffandting profile image
stuffandting

Slightly unconventional suggestion, but you missed off COBOL :) There are 220 BILLION lines of code underpinning many financial and retail systems, and it's going nowhere soon - there's no ROI for organisations to decipher and re-write that old code in anything modern, and the support base of developers that understand it is ageing and a finite resource.

No one in their right mind would actually choose to learn COBOL now, but you might choose to like money - and I have no doubt as that developer base retires off, this will be a very lucrative skill!!

Did I mention you'd have to be out of your mind...? How much is your sanity worth :)

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egilhuber profile image
erica (she/her)

Hypothetically, if one wanted to learn COBOL, where would they start?

asking for a friend

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deciduously profile image
Ben Lovy • Edited

I started here - but never made it that far.

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ghost profile image
Ghost

Nice list, SQL doesn't get much love but hiding behind ORMs just delay the unavoidable, you are gonna need SQL some day.

About Linux, similar to SQL, don't avoid the terminal, those who claim that if you don't brush your teeth with bash you are inferior are just elitist Pr¡($, but being confortable in a terminal is priceless, you'll struggle at first but in the long run you'll get much more productive than with the mouse and you'll fell free of many limitations, you'll need just SSH to manage remote machines, you'll find at home with tools like: Docker, psql, git, etc. Not always you'll find the GUI that you like, but the underlying CLI (Command Line Interpreter) is always there and unlike the GUIs don't change over time (not much at least) so the Bash, psql commands, etc. you learned 30 years ago is still relevant today and will be for many more years. And everything adds up so even if you move to Zsh, knowing bash will help you, and like SQL are usually agnostic of the implementation.

I also like Vim because is everywhere, you SSH to some cloud machine and if Vim is not there you'll at least have vi and your perfectly configured machine is just a copy/paste of your .vimrc away, you can even have it in a thumb drive and call Vim directly with that config.

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Thanks, Yes, VI is almost everywhere and there is no better way to take your config with you than .vimrc. completely agree.

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idanarye profile image
Idan Arye

What does any of this have to do with 2020? All of the bullets are valid for 2019 just as well. Or 2018. Or 2017...

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

I agree, I purposefully have chosen evergreen technologies that will serve developers a long time.

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madza profile image
Madza

Great news, more sleep in 2020..

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Muhammad Usama Ashraf

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ADS247365 Inc

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Derick Hess

UNIX has been around a lot longer than 30 years. Just shy of 50 years actually

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Yes, and I wish it lives for another 50 years :-)

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madza profile image
Madza

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie were ahead of their time ;)

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

I'll pass VSCode & Jupyter. I love my PyCharm Professional too much to bear with using others.

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

not a bad option, PyCharm is good but VSCod is polyglot and you can do programming in almost any language. It has probably the biggest collections of extensions or plugins.

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Justyn Clark

Bahahahahaha. Every time I pull branches from devs using VSC into my real man's powerful IDE IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate I automatically catch mistakes you can't with built in Code Inspections.

IntelliJ supports every language, I use it primarily for JS.

You get what you pay for, or rather don't get with freebies.

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steelwolf180 profile image
Max Ong Zong Bao

Hahaha, that your wrong Pycharm Pro is bundled with Webstorm so that was one of the reason for me to get it as well.

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vaibhavkhulbe profile image
Vaibhav Khulbe

Definitely gonna learn about containers (Docker) and a cloud service like AWS this year. Great list!

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

yes, that should be the top priority. If you can, serverless is also a good thing to learn.

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DELOWER| Areon

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hatenafish profile image
ルアー インプレ レビュー 感想 評価

Your article was translated and reprinted on qiita.com .
qiita.com/rana_kualu/items/c79a16f...

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Thanks for translating and informing me.

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efe profile image
Efe Ertugrul

mention atom editor please.
it is great and free.

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b93rn profile image
b93rn

The URL of the VIM masterclass seems to be wrong. It sends me to an auto formater page of Sublime.

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javinpaul profile image
javinpaul

Thanks for pointing out, correct that.

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Lizard

Very helpful post, thank you so much!

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ashik98bd

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Techno Hadayat

Very interesting and informative. Thanks buddy. Kutools for Word here