What makes a great web developer?

Nowadays, people are into web developing and the market becomes very saturated because there are many of those out there.

A web developer can be one of your most critical hires. After all, that’s the person who will create the online face of your company and enable you to interact virtually with your customers.

So, it’s especially important that you hire the right talent the first time out. Otherwise, you risk hurting your business, as well as wasting time and money seeking a replacement.

Web developers also need to step-up their game in order to be selected among the few who can earn a more decent salary than the others.

That’s why it is important for both entrepreneurs and web developers to know what makes a great web developer.

1. Coding don’t cut it anymore
We’re in a world where coding is becoming less impressive. Everyone builds sites, some of them code but you don’t have to. It’s no longer just the nerdy who can create sites, apps and features. Since the web came along and people could teach themselves there have been self-taught developers. But even the graduates are under threat.

Developers need to be better in two ways: breadth and depth. They need to understand the breadth of human interactions in their team and with the things they build. They need to understand the depth of the system they’re working with, down to the O/S.

2. The big caveat
You need to have an edge, and this is: be more techy and be muchmore human.

3. Understand the medium on what the internet says
Googling for ‘essential web development skills’ brings up what you’d expect. Framework knowledge, x-browser, CSS and JS. They list frameworks you should know, platforms you must be writing for and new trends you should be keeping an eye on. A developer can understand every detail of the system, tell you every feature of an API and a new CSS technology but still produce something unusable.

Developers, like everyone, need to understand their medium – but they must also understand the audience, be that the users, the team or other developers. They need to understand how their medium fits into the world (in other words, the production environment) and what effect it has (how people use it).

4. Build Tools
These tools are important for accelerating project development, so make sure you have a far richer tool set than your language

5. Devops
Devops flies in the face of two traditional silos: production, which keeps things running, and development, which makes new stuff. The silos result in two camps with little sympathy for each other. Devops is a huge field in itself, encompassing continuous deployment and lots of automation. This is a sweeping summary, but the key thing developers need to understand is the stack they’re running on.

6. Know how to fix it.
The ability to fix apps requires excellent problem solving skills, but not just debugging code. Learn to debug and use other options and methods as well.

7. What users want
Understand what the people around you are trying to do. Enjoy the code – love the art of indenting CSS files perfectly, or optimizing a rails app – but remember that it’s all for a purpose.

8. Drawing and writing
Drawing is the most direct way of communicating what stuff will be like. Developers must be able to draw their ideas. Developers must be able to prototype on paper, printing screenshots and scribble on them just to communicate their intention.

9. Enjoy yourself
Enjoy it even if it’s just the challenge of getting through the work.

10. Stay sharp
Stay sharp. Find competition. The worst kind of anything is one in isolation.