The Developer Who Makes Everyone Better

In popular culture, we often worship developers that work in solo, sitting tight in a corner and build everything by themselves. They lived in vim editor, bulldozes through codebases, and are the only ones who can understand the code. They are the heroes of the story. I was too in the beginning of my career, thinking that being a solo developer is the only way to be a good developer.

But as I gain enough experience working in organisations, I figured that that was a naive view to look in the bigger picture. The best developers I lucky enough to work with are not the best in everything, they are wonderful sole contributors but what impressed me the most is how they can make everyone around them better and grow in the organisation.

The best developers always:

• They are always willing to help others
• They hunt down the root cause of the problem rather than just the symptom so it wont happen again
• They write context documentation so the next person doesnt tripped to the same problem
• They review code to grow peers, not to gatekeep. Comments are meant to teach and not to suit their ego
• They propose architectural or process to solve today's pain point, and reduce tomorrow friction
• They think as a system, how this changes effect the teams as whole rather than only for his own works
• They are not invested in their own solutions, if their initial solution is not working, they are willing to change it and not afraid to admit it

This mindset compound and contagious, it will spread to the whole team and the organisation. Knowledge and wisdom will be shared. Onboarding shrinks. Incident drops. Delivery predictability increases. The motivation around the team will be high as everyone feels like they are part of the solution.