These 7 Coding Skills Give You an UNFAIR Advantage

the best piece of advice that I've ever received was to find my unfair Advantage now I encourage you to do the exact same by mastering these few coding skills that will really make you stand out as a developer now the first way to do that is to be resourceful you may notice that on every High performing team they have one or two developers who are the go-to guys the ones who get stuff done who figure it out who are responsible for the biggest most challenging features and the most critical and damaging bugs I know when I worked at Microsoft the top senior developers were really running the team and that's because they were resourceful they knew how to fix every single problem not because they've done it before but because they knew how to find the solution they went to stack Overflow they went to Google they read documentation they consulted with their teammates and now in this age they're using chat GPT you need to be a developer who goes out of your way to figure out problems find Solutions and not just cry when you can't figure it out immediately you need to use the resources available ailable to you and use them as effectively as possible now one of the easiest ways to be resourceful today is to know how to use AI tools like chat GPT specifically to know what they're good at how to prompt properly and when to be cautious of the responses it's giving you now fortunately for you our video sponsor HubSpot has a completely free resource called how to use chat GPT at work that teaches you exactly that it gives you a comprehensive overview of how chat GPT works the best practices when using it and some expert insight so will really help you take it to the next level you can check it out for free from the link in the description now this resource shares a ton of knowledge and even gives you a 100 actionable prompts that you can use to leverage the full power of chat GPT knowing how to use something like this is really a game Cher and it will completely level you up as a developer now this resource and many other free resources are provided by our video sponsor HubSpot massive thank you to them and make sure to check this out from the link in the description now the next skill you need to master is Version Control now I'm not just talking about basic git creating commits adding to the staging area I'm talking about having a true deep understanding of git and how it works and being able to use that understanding to solve complex errors that are bound to happen in complex development Cycles I can't tell you how many times I've worked with a developer who understands the basics of git they know how to add commit and really push to a new Branch beyond that though they're completely lost they run into merge conflicts they have issues rebasing and merging they have a completely messed up history and it just makes it an absolute nightmare if you're the developer that understands get deeply knows how to do things like cherry-pick commits switch over to deploy branches take specific commits from one area to another area restore code to a previous state all of those Advanced features which is really where G comes in handy you are going to stand out and you'll notice that people will be coming to you with all of their git issues trust me this is a massive skill to learn and developers that know this absolutely stand out now the next thing you need to master is data structures and code efficiency often times when you're writing code you're not going to be implementing a heap or a linked list but you're going to use things that you would have learned from those types of topics to build more efficient data structure specifically for retrieval or access of information a lot of times when you're working in large systems you're going to have a ton of data and you need to come up with creative and clever ways to access and manipulate that data that doesn't cost a lot of resources memory storage whatever it may be I can tell you as someone who's been working a lot on backend systems recently coming up with creative data structures using creative indexing methods and having a good knowledge of those Baseline data structures really does make you stand out and allows you to produce code that other people just don't know how to make they don't have that Insight they don't know how to do things efficiently and they don't necessarily know the implications of the ways in which they're storing data trust me this is important learn this skill [Music] now the next skill you need to master is scripting and automation now this can be in any language or technology that you want but having the ability to work with the file system quickly understand how you can write a simple script that doesn't need to be the cleanest code in the world that can automate a quick task that can save developers even 10 20 seconds every time they open the code base is a massive skill I remember one of the best developers I ever worked with was really a master at scripting anytime there was a task it was going to take more than say 5 10 minutes manually he'd just whip up a quick script for it and he'd save myself and him a ton of time anytime I had a pretty monotonous kind of repetitive issue I'd just message him he'd whip up a script and it really made me realize how powerful that skill is and it's been something I've been working on more and more so trust me understanding how to script quickly being comfortable in a language like python bash scripting even something like nodejs is really really powerful it will make you stand out and most of all it's going to save you a ton of time next asynchronous programming now this is something that most developers have a rudimentary knowledge of but I'm talking about really truly understanding this and knowing the techniques and best practices to write the most efficient code possible often times when you get into larger systems you have a ton of different calls that are be being made sorry asynchronously now you want to know how to synchronize those calls you can eventually grab all of the data from them how to handle different errors how to do things like timeouts and how to run those calls kind of in parallel or truly asynchronously so you're really taking advantage of that asynchronous code I won't go into this too far but I really recommend that you brush up on your skills here and understand the depths of your language and whatever asynchronous kind of framework that you're using moving on we have CI and CD now this is something that's typically reserved for more of a devops type role but in a smaller team setting or where you don't have access to that individual knowing how to do continuous integration and continuous deployment is an absolute game Cher this will absolutely make you stand out and is a skill that most developers don't learn until they're pretty much forced to do it if you can have even just basic understanding of how to run automated test cases how to use GitHub actions how to do a simple automatic deployment this is going to save yourself and your team a massive amount of time and make you a huge asset wherever you're working now lastly clear concise and accurate communication I can't tell you how frustrating it is when you have to go back and forth with someone 10 20 30 times simply because of a misunderstanding learning how to write precisely accurately and even sometimes a bit for boly intentionally really makes you stand out and will help you a ton what I mean by that is when you're writing a paragraph when you're sending an email when you're doing a voice note whatever it is that you're sending you're being very very intentional to make sure there's no misunderstanding and you are 100% completely clear in what it is that you're saying this is something I've been practicing for a long time and that I'm still improving at day by day but I try to make sure every time I explain something especially if I want someone to do a task for me that I'm being as clear as possible and they can get every single requirement every piece of information and there's absolutely no ambiguity in what it is that I'm saying to them just something to consider something I would definitely recommend practicing and you'll notice how much faster your workflow speeds up when you don't need to constantly be going back and forth hopping on calls clar Ying that doesn't need to happen when you are as precise and accurate as you can possibly be in the first kind of chain of communication so with that said guys we'll wrap it up here I hope you found this valuable if you like this type of content subscribe to my channel check out some other videos and of course let me know what you thought in the comments down [Music] below

Channel: Tech With Tim

Views: 442,581

Keywords: tech with tim, software testing skills required, programming is not enough, how to get better as a developer, required software skills, learn linux ubuntu, learn cloud computing, how to containerize nextjs app, learn api from scratch, learn git, learn devops, learn linux, git tutorial, learn docker, aws certification, azure certification, git tutorial vscode, travis media, docker tutorial, learn databases, unfair advantage

Id: bYYd_IlOb9k

Length: 7min 55sec (475 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 12 2023