Every Developer Needs To Know How To Do This

Key Takeaways

as a developer there are a million different things that you could be learning right now but there's one skill in particular that you need to learn if you want to have a successful career this is something I learned early on in my career and absolutely catapulted my career to new levels it set me apart from a lot of Junior developers and it made the clients that I was working with incredibly happy and led to me getting multiple raises at my job this one skill may sound like it's got to be something crazy complicated and Technical but it's not even a technical skill all that you need to do is to learn how to realize why you are writing the code that you are writing and to get down to that nitty-gritty level of why you're writing that code this sounds like an easy skill that you're probably already doing but in reality you're not going far enough in this video I want to talk about exactly how you can hone this skill figure out what you need to do and how you can use this skill to catapult your career to new levels or even land your first job welcome back to web dev simplified my name is Kyle and my job is to simplify the web for you so you can start building your dream project sooner and in order to really show you the reason why this skill is so important I want to tell you a story from my developer career by a time I didn't use this skill and how it led to tens of thousands of dollars of lost money so we're going to rewind all the way back to when I was working at an agency and I was working with Disney and I was working on their financial department so I was helping write Financial software for them to manage like budgeting and stuff for new projects not super exciting stuff but it was you know code and it was working and at the point I got a request from a person I actually talked with them one-on-one and they had a request they said hey I have a lot of excel sheets that are running all this different budgeting software and doing all these different things can you add in the functionality for me to create certain charts and Export certain data from your software so that I don't need to write all these complex Excel sheets to do all this and I was like yeah that's a pretty easy thing to do I can add some charts to the data so you don't have to write your Excel charts for it and I can make it so you can export certain data that you need for certain things that's a relatively easy feature now easy doesn't really mean quick it still took quite a while to develop this feature because adding in all these custom charts and stuff was not super easy to do because there's a quite large and complex code base so I spent a significant amount of time working on this feature I wasn't working on other features I was working on this feature for adding new charts and adding new things and even at the time when this guy came to me with this request I asked him multiple questions about okay why do you need these charts and why do you need these exports and he explained to me why he needed them and I asked him okay you know what are you doing in those PowerPoint or Excel sheets and he told me exactly what he was doing so I got a pretty good idea of why I thought I was writing this code so I thought that I was following this Rule and making sure I knew why I was writing my specific code but I didn't dive deep enough it wasn't until I was most of the way through writing my code and I was giving it back to this guy to say hey can you test this and let me know if this gives you exactly what you're looking for and he started playing around in the you know code that I wrote and he was looking at it and he said you know what it's actually doing a lot of the things I wanted to do I'm getting the charts I want I'm getting some other things but hey can you add this one extra feature to it that i' forgot about I'm like okay sure that's not that bad I spent a little time added that extra feature gave it back to him and he's like oh you know know what can you actually add this extra feature as well I added that extra feature gave it back to him and we went back and forth with like this for a little while adding extra features and doing extra things and it was taking significant amount of time to add a feature give it back to him come back add a feature give it back to him and so on it wasn't until after multiple iterations of making a feature and giving it back that I finally sat down again I'm like okay we need to really go through and figure out exactly what the use case you're using this for is and as he started to really get in depth with exactly what he was doing inside these Excel sheets and all the different charts he was trying to export I realized that he really didn't need all these complicated charts and exports and everything and that the actual data that he needed could be implemented much easier I could essentially just add an extra column to the table of data that we're already displaying that would give him 99% of all the information that he needs I don't need any of these fancy charts or exporting all I needed to do was add one single column which required me to write one extra little bit of SQL code so the amount of work that I spent was weeks and weeks of work building out all these additional features and charting and in reality all I needed to do was spend a couple hours adding an extra you know chart column to this table it was that easy and this is why it's so important to understand why you're writing the code that you're writing not only do you need to understand the entire domain of the business that you're working in so in that particular case I was doing finance software for managing project budgets I had a pretty good understanding of exactly why I was writing my code it was to help people in the accounting department finalize and do estimating for budgets and so on I knew the overview high level of what the code was doing but I didn't know exactly what every single feature I was implementing was doing for example I thought these charts were going to be helping with you know doing estimates and en counting and so on but really the actual data they needed for that particular thing was a much simpler piece of data I could have got in a much better way and it's important that you know this skill because a lot of times if a non-technical person is coming to you and telling you what they want they generally don't know the best way to get there A lot of times they'll say hey can you make this feel better or look better or act better or maybe they're like hey this thing doesn't quite feel right when you do this particular thing can you change how it works and they give you kind of fuzzy language for exactly what they want and even if they are giving you specific language on things that you need to fix and change they may not know that there are better ways to do that based on what they actually want deep down so it's always important especially when working with clients and doing freelance work to really dive in and try to figure out okay what is it that they actually want at the root level they're telling you what they think that they want you to implement to fix their problem but you really want to figure out what is the problem that they're running into because maybe the solution they're telling you is not actually the best solution to solve that problem and even if they are coming to you with just a problem and no solution make sure you try to dig a little bit deeper to figure out what the root of that problem they're running into is because it may actually impact how you write the solution for it and I know it may sound like this is something that's only applicable if you're doing like freelance work and so on but it's even applicable at a normal everyday job while I was at this exact same Agency company I was working on some internal projects at one point where is only going to be used for the particular company I was working at so very similar to writing software at a normal company and even then I still ran into these problems where I had to make sure I really dove in and figured out okay what is the use case for this why do you want this what is the underline root problem that you're trying to solve digging deeper and deeper into every single thing that you're told to do will really help you with writing the best possible code also it'll save you tons of time because like as you can see in the example I told at the beginning of this video I spent weeks and weeks writing out this code when I probably could have done the same exact thing in a single day to solve the problem in a better way so usually if you're writing code that doesn't actually solve the underlying problem they're going to come back to you and say hey you know what I love this code that you wrote but I still need you to make changes because it didn't actually solve the thing they want even though they thought it would so how exactly do you improve this skill cuz it's easy for me to tell you to do this but how exactly do you go about it well the first thing that you're going to want to do is to figure out the domain of the project you're working on the higher level like I said the accounting that I was working on inside that financing project figure out what the high level overview of the project is the next thing that you can work on is if there's like a certain section of the that you specialize in maybe more so than other sections try to figure out really good and in-depth what that section of the application is doing so if you're only working on like six different pages of an application figure out exactly why those pages are being used and even if you have the ability talk to the people using those pages if I had the ability to talk to the accountants and so on that were using these Pages it may have helped me see exactly what they wanted from these pages instead of trying to guess from you know being three levels removed if a project manager is talking to them and then telling the Project Lead and then the project lead makes you know some story for me to follow it's a lot of steps removed so trying to get as close to the source as possible will really help I know this isn't always possible at every company but even if you can talk to like the project League or the project manager and ask them hey can you go back to the actual people that created this issue this problem and ask them a few additional clarifying questions so I can figure out what the root of that problem is this will again help you with writing better code now another thing you can do is a lot of times in a software company you're going to be having a board of different tasks that you can accomplish and a lot of times these tasks are pretty well spelled out it'll be like hey go to this particular page add this particular button that does this particular thing they're very easy do this do that do this done but a lot of times they don't really have any intent behind them it may say hey create this button on this page that does this thing but you don't really know why people want that button added to that page and often times if you run into a task like this that has a lot of steps on what to do but not really why you want to do this I would again go back and ask the Project Lead project manager whoever put that task in there ask them hey why are we adding this button to the page I understand that it's supposed to do X Y and Z but what is the reason we want to add this button you may realize the button isn't even needed because you already have something on a different page that does exactly what they want or you may realize hey this button actually should probably do an additional two or three things that it's not listed in the task based on what they want or you may just find out that you can just do it exactly as is and it won't matter the nice thing about this technique though is it doesn't matter if you go back and you find out you don't need to change anything or you go back and you find that you do need to make a lot of change either way you'll know at the end when you finish building out this project it's going to most likely conform exactly to what your client or your user wants which means that they're going to be incredibly happy with your work because instead of constantly having to go back and do revision after revision they're getting what they want on the first or maybe even the second attempt which is much better than a lot of companies and people can do project managers project leads clients and even employers are going to notice that you have these skills and notice how you are able to effortlessly complete projects that don't need tons of changes and that will lead to you getting better raises promotions more clients more hours whatever it is that you want you're going to be able to obtain that by implementing just this one single skill and it's not even a technical skill so it doesn't matter how bad you are at programming this can put you a league ahead of people that are 10 times better at programming than you because you're able to do things that the company actually wants instead of just writing good code now you may not have any good places to implement this skill yet because you're still looking for your first job and if that's the case I highly recommend checking out this video linked right over here cuz it goes over my top tips how to get hired right now