Anyone can become a developer – even against all odds.But what makes someone an outstanding developer? To us, it's not your technical knowledge (your technical skills will need constant refreshing, anyway).Rather, what can set you up for long-term success as a developer are the characteristics that can help you enjoy your work, as well as excel into higher positions over time. If you're considering or actively pursuing a career in development, skim this piece and see if any of the six characteristics we highlight resonate with you:

6 characteristics that can make you an outstanding developer

It's fascinating to learn how things work. But there's a difference between learning the theory of how things work, and putting those concepts into practice.If you get satisfaction from building something and seeing it in motion, imagine how good it feels to know the software you worked on is running on peoples' devices around the world. While it does involve sitting at a computer, coding is a hands-on building process, wherein each program has its own design and purpose.Your creations as a developer affect how people interact with technology on a daily basis.

1. You're a builder

In case you imagined programming is great for those who'd rather keep their head down at a computer than interact with others – this is an outdated myth. In fact, software development is a team sport. This is undeniably true if you're working on a coding project with other developers, whether within a company or an open-source community.There are plenty of opportunities to collaborate in a developer role. If you love teamwork, your instinct for collaboration and communication will help make these activities more intuitive, impactful, and enjoyable.

2. You're a team player

If you're a creative problem-solver, you have a knack for crafting intuitive or overlooked solutions to pressing problems. In the software industry, this means you can bring valuable perspective to your team, as well as branch off to spearhead your own innovative solutions.Your vision for creative solutions can help you or your team implement practical approaches to problems big and small.

3. You're a creative problem-solver

In a broad sense, being empathetic means you can put yourself in another person's shoes. This ability to switch perspective is incredibly useful in the development world.Your understanding of others will help you make decisions that better support the needs of your colleagues, as well as the needs of your software's user.Overall, empathy will help you anticipate the needs of your colleagues, which in turn, will enable you to support the overall productivity of your team. And lastly, empathy is an important leadership skill that will get you further in your career.

4. You're empathetic

Wherever you are on your coding journey, you're likely to encounter challenges. Software may fail, or you may fail. The challenges you face will be unique to your particular journey. If you can stay determined and keep your goals in sight, despite failure, it'll help you stay resilient throughout your career.As with any competitive field, your determination will help you keep momentum, as well as serve as an example for others. To date, we at Educative have spoken with many successful developers who had a pivotal failing point on their coding journey. Their determination

5. You're determined (and maybe a bit competitive)

If you love learning, you'll never exhaust your learning opportunities in a coding career.The tech industry changes fast, and there will always be new technologies to add to your toolkit. Outstanding developers are always ready to stretch their technical skillset to keep up with the industry and compete in the job market. Development is a pursuit of lifelong learning. If you have a growth mindset and are a dedicated learner, it'll only serve you well in the future.The learning really never stops in development, so if you're a student at heart, you'll never feel stagnant in a coding career.

6. You love learning new things

While it's important to master your technical skills, who you are at your core will play a role in your long-term success as a developer.If any of the characteristics in this piece resonated with you, that's great! They'll surely help you on your coding journey. In the end, the only thing that will make you an outstanding developer is you, and how you choose to shape your unique coding journey. You don't need any prior knowledge, or anything installed on your desktop to get started. We'll just start from the ground up, and you can start writing code as soon as you're ready.

Wrapping Up 

Characteristics that set you up for long-term success as a developer are the characteristics that can help you enjoy your work, as well as excel into higher positions over time.

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Outstanding Developer skills 

Technical issues are the number one reason why apps get deleted, so make sure you understand customer experience (CX) through all phases of the product life cycle. CX is the sum of the user’s interaction with the app or product, starting at the consideration stage and moving through support, upgrades, and eventual replacement or removal from use. Think about the interactions with your customer during each of these phases—before, during, and after they use your products.

1. It’s not just about UX. It’s also about customer experience

As a developer you might be lucky enough to meet real-life users, but often you can’t stay in constant touch with them. On top of that, you probably have your own biases and opinions about usability, and with travel and budget constraints, developers sometimes query people who are in close proximity to them but aren't representative of the wider user population.[…] Once you receive feedback, be sure to follow up on it in a timely fashion and apply it to your product.

2. Validate your assumptions with actual users

This is a key part of UX, and in my experience, nothing other than perfect will do. As Todd DeCapua says in "Why performance engineering is essential to business success," if your page takes more than two seconds to load, people are likely to assume that it has issues and walk away. So it’s important to test performance and latency under real-world conditions, using 3G, 4G, and Wi-Fi, and then test while moving between these networks.

3. Performance is just as important as functionality and design

Help users orient themselves, and make it easy to go forward and backward easily within your app—not just when scrolling but also after page refreshes. Users should know where they are in the application at any given time, regardless of the actions they’ve taken.

4. Use clear and simple navigation

A door doesn’t have a sign saying “Open me." People know that's what a door is for. What they want to know is where it leads. The better approach is to explain what a link does and where it will take them.

5. Avoid “click here” links

Double scrolling occurs when you have two scrolls in the same direction, with one of them in a frame, or when you have a combination of horizontal and vertical scrolls. This is extremely confusing for users and often leads to errors. It also makes it nearly impossible to use the app on a device with a touch/swipe user interface.

6. A double-scroll is poor UX

Skeuomorphism, the design practice of making items resemble their real-world counterparts, is your friend, but you should only take it so far. Having a disk icon for saving or a printer icon for printing is intuitive, but don’t invent new concepts or representations. Limit yourself to reusing well known visual concepts.

7. Use clear, recognizable, and consistent icons

Users access most pages from mobile as well as tablets, laptops, and desktop computers, so your pages should look good and be easy to use on any platform and at any resolution your users might require. Make sure fonts as well as graphics are part of your responsive design, and be sure that you honor any accessibility settings that the user has configured.

8. Align fonts for mobile

Errors happen, but if messages are not clearly visible and informative, they're just an annoyance. […]Looking at both the strategic and tactical levels where you can affect user experience, engagement, and satisfaction will help you avoid some mistakes and create a truly differentiated product.

9. Show informative error messages

Here are the top strategic and practical user experience (UX) tips and best practices to help developers give their apps a competitive advantage.

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9 UX tips and strategies for software developers

As already mentioned, debugging is considered a subset of troubleshooting. However, troubleshooting does not always entail solving the problem at that moment in time. There may be procedural constraints or workflow protocols that prevent the issue from being solved immediately. Debugging, on the other hand, is meant to discover and fix a problem all in the same session, whenever possible.People use the two terms interchangeably, which can add to the confusion

What is the difference between troubleshooting and debugging?

Troubleshooting and debugging are two concepts programmers need to learn and distinguish between. You not only need to understand the two terms but understand how they differ and know their common traits. Know their differences and best practices.

Tech tips / articles 

Troubleshooting vs Debugging: What’s the Difference & Best Practices

To solve a problem, you have to understand exactly what the problem is. 
When you start solving a problem, be sure to understand the starting point, the end goal, and the obstacles in between. The worst possible thing is to produce a solution that actually doesn’t do what’s expected.

Understand the requirements

It's important to understand what is how big the problem is.Use questions like:<ul><li>How many requests the system should satisfy?</li><li>What is the expected response time?</li><li>How many resources do we have?</li><li>What about deadlines?</li></ul>

Understand the size of the problem

The chance someone else already solved your problem is high. All you have to do is a search in the literature to find out if there is a solution for a problem matching your use case. There is no point in reinventing the wheel.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Implement your solution trying to make it understandable by your grandma. 
Avoid fancy and complex implementations. Put them aside in favor of a simple and understandable one. And optimization to the moment they are necessary.

"Grandma-driven" development

The work of a Software Engineer is to solve problems. Everything can be reduced to this activity. This is why it is important to have a solid methodology to tackle problems. We are engineers after all, and we are trained to solve problems. We have to do it like an engineer.

Outstanding Developer skills

9 UX tips and strategies for software developers

Troubleshooting vs Debugging: What’s the Difference & Best Practices

Do it like an engineer

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