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5 Ways Successful Developers Learn

Ellen Twomey
3 min readFeb 1, 2020

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Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

Perfect Existing Skills

Becoming a master sounds amazing, but it is not always glamorous. Becoming a master requires perfecting existing skills. To do that a successful developer might look for a new angle on handling a specific issue in the code. She might then dig deeper into an existing function for a different approach to execution. Learning new ways to use existing syntax is another trait successful developers possess. Just having working code is not the standard. Instead, successful developers ask, “ what is the best code we could possibly write; considering scalability, future feature requests and our users?”.

Learn one new skill on a regular basis

Learning is key to being successful in development, but it is the consistent building of one or two new skills on a consistent basis (e.g., weekly) that will have the biggest impact on software quality. Doing a 360 by changing direction because the newest tool is better, faster, or more efficient is typically a recipe for disaster. It’s hard to predict what can go wrong when you are new to an environment, language or architecture. By building a consistent new skills acquisition strategy, successful developers put themselves in a position to have great solutions to problems they have not come across yet. It’s the consistency that compounds…

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Ellen Twomey
Ellen Twomey

Written by Ellen Twomey

You are Techy founder, technology learning coach, bringing women to tech, tech mamma.

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