Do you spend more time in Linkedin, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Snapchat and you are work in the tech world? If your answer is yes, you should continue reading.
You are developing, testing, configuring or maintaining software. You are in the knowledge business and you are in charge of creating systems.
Before software can be reusable it first has to be usable.
– Ralph Johnson
The story of a young developer
I will tell you the story about our newly joined team member Pooja. It’s her first job and was hired after interviewing around 100 talent. We started with Test Driven Development, we make it clear that it will take time to learn new skills in software development.
While I was pairing with her on one of the user stories, there was a point we were writing a failing test. I asked her to write the production code to fix it. She took the keyboard and tried to quickly type the fastest solution possible. While doing it she accidentally cut paste a wrong piece of code.
Me: Why are you in a rush?
She: I want to complete this task fast.
Me: Why?
She: ………………………………………..silence…
I have observed this repeatedly. Be it Leadership, Creatives, Fresher or others. Most of us are in a hurry to complete the task.
Good software is never measured ONLY ON how quickly it was delivered. It is measured on many other factors too, like
- Solving Real Problems
- User Experience
- Clean Design
- Ease of Use
- Runs Faster
When you rush, you add bugs and it slows you down. A software with bugs makes it more difficult to deliver on time. When the software is very brittle, team and customers STOP having confidence in the software
One man’s crappy software is another man’s full time job.
– Jessica Gaston
You end up doing the same work again and again. You are in firefighting mode and you won’t learn new software skills.
Build your personal brand
The reason that learning new skills and doing new work or a new way of work is important because you can build your brand using any of the popular social media platforms.
You share why you do what you do, you share your new learning with the world and help you build your career.
Your personal brand can be a valuable asset for you to find your next job.
You can have a story to tell, WHY YOU DON’T HATE MONDAYS
The superpower of a good professional
Till now you read about a problem and an opportunity that will help you build a great career.
If you study all the successful people, you will learn that they do their best work with complete ease. It’s an effortless activity and they love to do it.
Here are my two advice that can be your superpower to get more time at work and do some meaningful work that you love and enjoy doing.
1) Discard 50% of your task
Are you shocked? With my experience, I have seen that any task can be broken down. You can get rid of many of them. Ask these questions
- Can we get the outcome without doing this task?
- What does the user really wants from this feature?
- Can we ask the customer and remove this feature?
- Is there a way to get the result using other features?
- Will the customer use this at all?
You can discard all the waste that is not required.
Another story
It’s about a feature we recently added to our platform. It is based on the first question above Ajeet and me asked.
We had to create a progress bar that showed the status for a background process to the scorecard. It was processing data between half million to 4 million data points for all the entities. Each data point may have a complex function that can have multiple steps.
So the initial natural design/plan was to put the counter at each data point for each entity. It was a crude solution but an initial thought. The bigger pain to us was to put the counter in the database and read it periodically and damage the performance further.
We asked, “Can we get the outcome without doing this task?“
We came up with a solution to calculate the number of entities processed irrespective of the data points in each entity. We also counted the progress only at 5% increment. Thus measuring it only 20 times per cycle.
It took us a few lines of code at the iteration point of entities. The solution was implemented in an afternoon and the client verified it the next day.
Estimated 4 days of work completed in 4 hours
It gives me an idea of where the background proccess currenlty is and when it may expect it to complete – Our Client
2) Automate
You should make the computer work for you. You can’t imagine how much you can automate. I will only list a few and you can figure it out.
- Automated Testing
- Continuous Integration
- Logging your time tracker
- Regular Maintenance Work
- Ad-hoc reports
- Auto Start require tools on Startup
- Refactoring
- Script any operational activity
- many more…
The main thing with a superpower is you have to use them daily, rather hourly to make a real impact.
Vikram Shetty 
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