Producing outcome
Producing Outcome - How to be a great developer.
I am, like you, a kind of passionate developer. I spend my free time digging the internet, programming on personnal projects, increasing my programming skills.
I am still bad developer. I still feel a degree of magnitude worse than top Django developers. Are they 10X better and if yes, how do that manage to be that good? I don’t believe in natural abilities and I don’t want to explain their supremacy by a genetic/cultural reason. Work overtake abilities 99% of the time. Smart work even better.
I noticed a common pattern when seeing my actual manager(@codeinthehole) growing as a python developer.
All the top-notched developer spend their time on producing output. Whatever they do at work or for fun leads tends to maximize benefit, even if they might not be aware themself, even if that may not be their motivations.
Valuable outputs
Sounds like a financial course. But what is valuable for finance, eg money, is only a subset of what is valuable for a developer. I left a well paid job as an IT guy in financial companies to get a funny web dev job, and that choice was valuable.
What kinds of output can we product which is valuable. Most of us don’t think we have anything valuable. Things valuable are:
- Things increasing money
- Things increasing visibility
- Things increasing reputation (as a developer)
- Things which increase targeted knowledge (sorry guys, reading all hackernews article is not really valuable)
- Things which increase opportunities
Increase money
Obvious but hard to achieve. All the others may have an impact on this one. Getting a better salary is one way. Doing some freelancing is another one. When you have a good reputation/visibility, that should be easier.
Increase visibility
We are unknown. Lost into thousands of other devs. Getting visibility is one problematic a dev should try to solve, patiently, but other time. When your next awesome company will contact you for a new job offer, they will try to get some info about you. Even better, you may have done something people need and hire you for that. That must be already the case but if nobody know, that’s as useless as having done nothing. Give what you’ve done to the world but do it well. README, docs, easy installation, tests, package your stuff properly and ease people using it life.
Write blogs, open source your best tool, participate in stack overflow, tweet dev tips.
Increase reputation
There is things which gives you credit. Being Flask author (@armin ronacher) gives you better credit when you try to sell yourself as a Flask expert (just an example, no fact here). Same if you are a Django core developer. Not that’s easy to do. There is another which is easier, speaks at a conference or a meetup group on a subject you know well. You will get extra visibility, for sure, but you get more than that. You will be seen as a top developer, at least, by people who liked your talk. I’ve seen many Django talks at DjangoCon and DJUGL, 95% of the speakers where top developers, at least according to me.
Increase knowledge
That’s my favorite occupation, learning new stuffs and ready about new stuffs. Useless most of the time, incredibily useless sometimes. I get great benefit from actively learning Django before I moved to London. But that was targeted and deep study, not ready some random blog post on the internet. You should focus on valuable knowledge, something which brings you later benefits. Any other knowledge is not to be prohibited, but it’s not work, it’s pleasure.
Increase opportunities
You may all think of becoming rich with the new unavoidable website or other projects. Meeting right people help and can foster that incredibly. Meeting people is valuable. Great devs meet the others.
Great devs were newbee before. You don’t have to be great to start sharing, creating tool or whatever. You will become great doing it. You did already most of the work getting the knowledge and programming, facing loads of issues and exploring the net. You only some extra time allocated to share this time, you can start to become great.
And stop read that, this is definitly not valuable.
Btw, after that post, I am “Great level 1”