Athletes train their physical abilities and their sports specific skills. How can developers do the same using that analogy?

JC Smiley - Jun 29 '20 - - Dev Community
  1. The nature of athletics leads to comparing your skills with others. Athletes compete during practice with their team and against others, usually starting at a small level and working up to top level competition. You shouldn't be alone in your pond. Joining social groups and working with others helps you to see how others do things, gives a sense of humility, and also competitiveness and aspiration.

  2. To become skilled at anything you need discipline and grit. Set short and long term goals, write them somewhere so you can see them, and chase them. "No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who are trained by it."

  3. Athletes train hard to be able to handle any situation encountered in their sport. Therefore, in tech if we expose ourselves to many concepts, we will build a powerful arsenal of resources to handle any situation.

  4. A funny thing about muscle development is in order grow bigger muscles, you have to strain your current muscle to the point of damage. As it is with us, and the pains we go through with bugs and missing semicolons, all to increase our muscle memory for certain tasks and mental strength (read flexibility) for more complex tasks.

  5. Robustness is the breadth of a person or a team's skills profile. Like an athlete who competes in the decathlon (10 events) is Robust. Anti-Fragility describes systems that adapt and rebound after a challenge. Developers should be Robust and Anti-Fragile in learning from the pains and errors to become stronger.

  6. Athletes first recognize their region where they lack. Knowing our weak spots can give us a direction to work in.

  7. Touch typing skills are a must. The faster you type CORRECTLY the more work that you will get done when you are writing code.

  8. Read other people's code. Whether it is a formal code review or just browsing open source repositories. You will start to develop a sense for what makes code readable.

  9. Talking about code and development is a skill. It's hard but a skill to mix business terms, variable names, and programming concepts in conversation.

Contributors:Corey McCarty, Agrit Tiwari, Steve Hallman, Dennis Kennetz, Coriano Harris, Lawrence LockHart

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