Get Good at This to Unlock Your Potential as a Developer

The Unspoken Requirement to Making Progress in Your Development Career.

Leo Carvalho
3 min readFeb 29, 2024
I made this on Figma.

Read.

That’s it, that’s the whole secret.

If you want to be a great developer, you’ve got to be able to sit and read. Documentation, logs, code, Stack Overflow, user stories, and project specifications. You name it.

You have to be able to sit down, start at the top of a page, and keep reading it until you get to the end.

It’s simple, but it has been one of the biggest challenges, particularly when you’re tired and you just can’t get the concentration you need. You’ve got to sit there and grind through.

Read your way to make an impact

When you’re able to do that, you all of a sudden become more impressive in meetings because you know what the subject is. You’ve read through the project docs and as you were reading, all of a sudden questions popped into your head and you can ask those questions — and sometimes they lead nowhere, but sometimes they make the project better. They lead to more impactful ideas.

You’ve read through the documentation of the libraries and programming languages your project is using, so you have some insight…

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Leo Carvalho

Writing about programming and the life of a developer, with some other things sprinkled in between