3 May, 2009

Skills that make a good developer

Posted by Bhavin Turakhia | (3) Comments

Joel Spolsky captures the essence of a good (read: recruitment material) developer in his succint mantra – “Smart and Gets Things Done“. My own personal part-plagiarised part-modified version has always been – “Smart, Takes Initiative, Gets things done, Paranoid about Perfection and is a Nice Person”. I believe Joel’s shorter version does not capture all these aspects – for instance being Nice and being Smart are mutually exclusive.

Both versions (mine and Joel’s), in their brevity, have a quotable-charm, but fail to provide a more detailed perspective. As a parallel effort, I wanted to list down, in micro-detail, a significantly more extensive document, of skills that I find good developers possess.

The current work-in-progress version of it has been put up at - What skills doth a good developer possess? within our Wiki. Granted that all developers at Directi do not possess all the skills listed. However the document serves as a “skills-to-acquire” list for our existing team, as well as a reference list for aspiring applicants. As someone who wants to join our organization, you should have several of these mastered, and be prepared to tackle the rest.

Excerpt from the document - What skills doth a good developer possess?

• Algorithmic skills
  • Understand and dissect complex problems quickly
  • Understand trade-offs between space / time complexity
  • Come up with solutions with minimal space / time complexity
  • … <snip>
• Data Structures
  • Basic Knowledge of data structures – Hashmaps, Binary tree, B-Tree, B+Tree, Linked Lists etc
  • Understanding of trade-offs between various data structures etc
  • … <snip>
• RDBMS
• Caching
• Networking
• … <snip>

For further details visit the complete document - What skills doth a good developer possess?

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