🛠️ How to Level Up Your Developers' Soft Skills...

Harley Ferguson

10 soft-skill tips for developers: Understand problems thoroughly, embrace multiple solutions, seek help as a strength, prioritize functional progress, avoid measuring productivity by lines of code, maintain a lighthearted approach, stay updated with trends, foster mentorship, use AI judiciously, and emphasize writing tests.

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Because better developers = better startups

Devs are known for a lot of things, but soft skills aren’t one of them (don’t @ us, this is public sentiment, not ours).

But in today's world, it’s almost impossible to build a business and not have software involved in one way or another. And when the devs are shining, it makes a lot of other things easier.

Then use AI to 100x I guess.

It requires more than technical skills

And that’s where South African software developer and entrepreneur Harley Ferguson comes in. Harley’s on a mission to help software developers be better by focusing on softer skills. He’s got a free ebook and weekly newsletter full of great content to become a better developer that you might wanna check out.

And, as we dove into his content, we found it useful for both developers and anyone that is working close to developers (i.e. most of you) and we thought, maybe we can all help each other get a bit better at this stuff. So here are some top learnings to help you or your developers 10x.

10 Practical soft-skill ways to help them be a better dev

  1. Go deeper and understand the problem – As developers, it's crucial to fully comprehend the problem before diving into coding to create effective and accurate solutions. Devs need time to think through and plan how to approach the problem – give them this.
  2. There are multiple ways to solve the same problem – Realize there are always multiple approaches to a coding problem and your job is to find the most suitable, necessitating flexibility and adaptation if the initial method proves inadequate. For every piece of functionality ask yourself, what is the problem here and what would mean success in the most practical way?
  3. Asking for help is a sign of strength not weakness – Seeking assistance when faced with challenges isn't indicative of weakness; rather, it promotes effective problem-solving and facilitates continuous learning – 2 heads are better than one.
  4. Your code need not be perfect – Aim for functional progress over idealised perfection in your coding process, fine-tuning as and when time allows. If your software is not in the market its use is zero – ask, “What is good enough right now?”
  5. Don’t measure yourself on lines of code written – One can often feel like making progress when you typed all day. But don’t measure yourself that way. The length of the code doesn't equate to productivity or efficiency. Concise, readable, and maintainable code is often the most effective.
  6. Take your code seriously, but not yourself too seriously – Laugh at your mistakes, meme it if you have to. This will make learning so much easier and work more enjoyable.
  7. Never stop learning and always stay up to date – Pursue continual self-improvement and stay current with the latest advancements and trends in your field. Sign up for newsletters, follow experienced devs and founders on Twitter, etc.
  8. Find a mentor to learn from and a mentee to coach – Foster growth by seeking guidance from mentors and imparting knowledge to mentees. Let them read your code and read theirs and chat about the soft skills needed to succeed.
  9. Use AI but don’t use it blindly – AI is great to help you get work done faster, but make sure you understand the code well, going through it line by line in order to keep growing and getting better while using it.
  10. Write tests, people. It's not that hard and everyone will thank you – Emphasize the importance of writing tests to ensure code functionality and improve overall team efficiency.

Want to go deeper? Sign up for Harley’s newsletter here.

Got a dev soft skill story to share, or maybe even a tip to add? Hit reply and let us know so we can share…

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