Out of all the different programming skills there are to have, which one do you think is the most important?

As a programmer, you need to be good at handling your logic carefully. You need to be good at math, passing your data from one module to another, and coordinating between different data modules. When it comes to working on a team, you need to know how to code with someone else, work on the same code base, and integrate your code with their code.

After coding for 10+ years, I think one skill really stands out: self-learning.

Many beginner programmers have it wrong. They keep thinking, “I need to learn this programming language,” and then another, and get better and better at those languages. But what you really need to do is learn how to self-learn other programming languages.

This is why I don’t think boot camps are very helpful. You can go into a boot camp and learn a lot of practical things, which are helpful to an extent. However, boot camps won’t teach you how to self-learn other programming languages, frameworks, and everything else in the software development world. You can master what the boot camp teaches, but what if that technology becomes obsolete? Would you be able to learn new programming languages or frameworks and adapt to the next big thing?

In this video, I’ll talk more about self-learning, share some anecdotes from my experience, and some observations about the digital world. By the end, you’ll see why I believe self-learning is the most important skill for a software developer.

Thank you for watching, and happy coding! 💻🧡
-Henrik