Know your limits and be patient ...

It's not surprising how most of the people want to have superpowers which enables them to easily read mind of others. Very few would want to explore themselves. However, I think it is crucial to be curious about ourselves, knowing what we are good at is obviously going to help us. Exploring our limitations is something that is going to boost our growth.

This growth could be in their academic, personal or work life. I have a lot to talk about on this topic, but in this article I would like to focus on developer skills.

Software developers are creators of the technical world we live in today. Being a graduate I see a numbers of skills that everyone says are critical for a developer to have. Most of those skills will be knowledge of programming languages (which I call materialistic knowledge) and some other common skills like team working, etc.

I believe that there are 2 core principles that every developer should apply to they work in order to grow and increase their knowledge horizon.

Know your limits

I went to a job interview last year for a developer role and I was asked

“how would you deal with a bug in your or someone else’s code?”.

My response to that was,

“I will send some time looking into it and fix it. However, if in any case I feel I can’t     work this I, I will put my ego on a side and ask another developer (doesn’t matter a junior or a senior)”.

Although it’s known that we should ask a well-defined question to get a good answer. However, as developers we should also know when you should ask for help of the another developer instead of spending too much time on fixing the problem.

Spending extra time on debugging is great for personal project as we don't normally have anyone to ask for help easily and on the other side the problem solving journey will teach us so many new things. However, when it comes to projects in the world of business we are playing with company’s money and our every single minute spent is a cost to company. If we don’t respect the time in that scenario, others have to shoulder the expense of our time spent on solving a particular problem all alone.

Moreover, we should also know what our current knowledge level is and build on top of that. Keep in mind that “Time is the biggest teacher” so don’t push yourself too hard, work in a smooth pace in respect to the time available, whilst keeping all other priorities in the mind. Be consistent in terms of building yourself and try to challenge your abilities when learning something new to increase your knowledge horizons.

Keep patience

“I started setting up local development environment by following the documentation but keep getting error, I got annoyed and left in between and asked for the person who written documentation to tell him/her that it is outdated.”

Exactly! There are many scenarios when setting up or running code just doesn't work. I kept getting red coloured message on screen. Sometimes bug/errors can be annoying and even if you doing the right thing they just don’t work.

However, that doesn’t mean we lose our patience or give up. Running into unexpected situations is an interesting part of life, there's always something we learn whilst overcoming challenges.

My thoughts and views might seem biased to some of you but when I think about developing life changing technology for the world I look for people who know their limits and they are able to work hard to break those limits.

Thats all for my thoughts, served in form of an article topped with a small poetry from my books

"progress like the flow of a river, let your imagination fly like a bird, if change is the only constant than be like a thunder to change the world..."