Most of the time we, developers focus on learning languages and programming and we totally ignore tools and their power. Some of us don’t even know how to customize their code editors, yeah…If I’m wrong then you should be using vim or at least neovim 😂.
This post is inspired by a situtation I went through yesterday in the company where I do consultancy work. Let me draw you the picture :
I was quietly working in my corner trying to finalize the integration of a Payment API in a backend service of the company when a message came to me saying: The HR manager wants you in her office. I wondered what it could be for. I stood up and went to her office and strangely she needed help with some cells formatting in Excel. You know when people are aging they tend to forget things, thus she was in a situation where she needed to input some matricule numbers in the cells. The matricule numbers should be in the format 0000XXXXXX. Since excel considers cells values to be numbers by default, whenever she entered the value in that format the starting 0000s were automatically striped out, and that was annoying her. So she called me in order to help her fix that. And it turned out she was asking to the wrong person 😅️. Since my intensive experience with excel was about three or four years ago and not practicing something on a regular basis makes you loose mastery in it. You got the picture right 😅️ ?. So I couldn’t help her sadly at that moment but after playing a little bit with excel again myself. So I got out of her office and went play a little bit with excel again and found out the way to actually do the trick. Then I came back and showed her how to do it.
Now I guess I’m not the only developer in that situation. As developer we are most of the time doing more technically intense work such as: fixing bugs, configuring databases, writing SQL queries, wrapping our head around programming paragigms, reading a ton of books in order to get good at our day to day engineering tasks, deploying apps to AWS, GCP, managing K8s clusters. So much things. And with all thoses things, and the huge amount of things we have to learn we forget stuffs like Excel, Word and some ovious tools we should maybe master. The thing is…you are not wrong forgetting about those tools 😅️. After all we have a superpower, we are pro at googling right 😅️ ?. Off course but we should know at least a bare minimum of those obvious tools that are not intensely used in workflow. I think that we should know a little bit of everything in order to stand out everyday, sure we don’t need to prove something to somebody. But we should…you get the idea right 😅️. There is a picture I don’t know how to think about: A highly skilled developper who cannot do basic calculus in Excel or write a well formatted document in Word. Tell me how it does look to you. Thank you and see you in the next one.