What are the skills of a good software developer

Skills can be divided in hard skills and soft skills.

What is the difference between hard skills and soft skills? Hard skills refer to the job-related knowledge and abilities that employees need to perform their job duties effectively. Soft skills, on the other hand, are the personal qualities that help employees really thrive in the workplace.

The hard skills, coding!

One of the main skills of a good software developer is the hard skill coding. Technical knowledge is a must have.
In our company hard skills like php, laravel, javascript, css, vue.js, git are a crucial part of the toolset. These hard skills can be learned by training and sharing of knowledge. Hard skills are easily trainable.

Other skills, the soft skills

Analytical thinking

Analytic thinking skills make it possible to cooperate with customers and think in their business process. It makes it possible to brainstorm and identify programmable parts of the business process of the customer. It makes it possible to foresee problems and tackle possible future problems.

Problem solving

If we have a software problem it's key to be able to identify the problem and pinpoint the possible cause. Knowing the cause of the problem is the start of the solving process. Talk with your colleague's, maybe they issued the same problem in another project so the underlying problem can be found faster.

Communication

Key in every organisation is communication. We have contact with non technical people, with customers. People who are the best in what they do, but they are not a programmer, not an analyst. We have to explain our possible solution in an understandable way.

Attitude and openness for new technologies

We live in an always evolving ecosystem. Once plain javascript and 'old' languages where key. Now we live in a fast evolving world where technologie and available tools evolve very fast. Be open for this evolution and detect, but also embrace, the good stuff.

Time management

We often work on different projects and different tasks. To keep an eye on budget and planned time it's important to keep track of your time and try to manage it as good as possible. It's key to make a good estimate so the spend time on a project is in balance with the estimate.

Conclusion

Coding, a hard skill is only a tiny part of the complete software developer. Soft skills are also important and sometimes the soft skills can be prior to hard skills. That's why not the best coder is the best developer but the most complete (combining hard and soft skills) one will be.