5 most underrated skills of a top developer

You all might have stumbled upon blogs like "Best books you should read to become a top developer", "Best frameworks you should learn to become a successful developer", etc. We all aspire to be ninja developers, and so, we try to gain more and more understanding of technical concepts.

Today, I am going to take you through some of the most basic, yet important skills, that bring a very significant impact upon a developer's life.

#1 Touch typing

We have 10 fingers, and the standard Qwerty keyboard is beautifully designed to use each of our fingers all together, without even looking at the keyboard.

Still, I've seen plenty of developers who type with 2-3 fingers only. Most of the time they spend is looking at the keyboard and then checking on the screen if they typed correctly.

We got to learn to use the keyboard, before using a keyboard. Touch typing is one of the best productivity hacks for developers, you save a lot of time and energy.

Wanna learn touch typing? Checkout KeyBr, 10FastFingers

#2 Documentation

Documenting a project is something that we all know is a good practice, but the least of us care to follow. Good documentation is one of the most important part of the Open Source world, includes information for contributors, applied coding conventions, file organizations, comments, naming conventions, programming practices, etc.

"Workers spend about 2.5 hours per day, or roughly 30% of the workday, searching for information."
Xenit

When you write clear and accurate documentation of your projects, not only it gives an easy way to others when they look at your code, it also works as an easy checkpoint for you while revisiting code after a week/month/year. It might be tiring at the beginning but very effective in the long run.

Check this: How to write a good documentation

#3 Data Structures and Algorithms

We're living in a world where data is more costly than oil/gold. More and more data is getting stored, processed, and slowing down the processing time of the systems, which costs tech companies a fortune. Effective and efficient use of these data is a challenge, and that's where DSA plays a very significant role.

Under the cloak of all your SQL and Linux commands are algorithms and data structures. Google manages to search plenty of information in a fraction of seconds, all thanks to its Page Rank algorithm. Spotify, compared to it's competitors, consumes least data and gives the best personalized music experience, thanks to its BaRT algorithm that analyzes every piece of audio to give you the one that Spotify is confident youll like.

Real-world problems that take months can be solved in minutes using the knowledge of DSA. Understanding of data structures and algorithms may not seem relevant in the development of small scale applications, but makes an exceptional difference in large scale applications.

For more interest, check this: Improving your Algorithms & Data Structure Skills

#4 Coding standards

Following standard coding practices have a very positive impact on the software and growth of the organization, it decreases security concerns and enhances performance very significantly.

Series of procedures are explicitly defined of each programming language, they can be for various aspects of the program written in that language and are considered as essential attributes of software development.

Todd Werth

@twerth

Good professional programmers write boring code. Great professional programmers write really boring code. Clever & obscure code is written by selfish people who would rather entertain themselves than be masters of their craft

17:02 PM - 05 Oct 2018

To structure a smoother process of maintaining the code and providing readability to the code, coding standards, and code quality are essential to be managed by every developer.

Read more: Importance of Code Quality and Coding Standard in Software Development

#5 Communication & Collaboration

Communication skills are equally as important as technical skills. It's said that failures in software teams result more often from communication issues than from technical problems. Just like every other aspect of life, communication and collaboration play a very crucial role in software development. Being a talented developer won't bring the desired results if there isn't a successful collaboration.

There are many success stories that I can talk about where effective collaboration led to a smart product. E.g. Twitter, Jack Dorsey was paired up with Biz Stone during a hackathon. He and Biz came up with the idea of Twitter, which today has 150M+ active users worldwide.

How to connect with fellow developers, and build up strong connections, asking for help, pointing bugs, and all together staying humble and polite is an art that every developer should master.

Learn more at Communication is Key to Software Engineering

These were the 5 most underrated skills of a top developer, in my opinion at least.

What do you think? Did I miss any? Put it down in the comments.

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Happy Coding!