In this video I'm sharing 3 skills that I believe are not appreciated enough among programmers and which can help a lot in becoming a better developer:

good memory
attention to details
thinking a few steps ahead

Contact:
✉️ email - gregory@notonlycode.org
🐦 Twitter - @GregoryWitek

📚 Resources

https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Joshua-Foer/Moonwalking-with-Einstein--The-Art-and-Science-of-Remembering-Everything/11234581 - "Moonwalking with Einstein - a very interesting book which proves that memory can be trained, and a fun story to read
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2016/06/learning-memory
https://www.health.harvard.edu/aging/4-tricks-to-rev-up-your-memory
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/regular-exercise-adds-up-to-big-memory-boosts

Notes

Intro

good memory, attention to details, long-term vision
3 things that helped me become a much better programmer
also curiosity, and writing, and... ok, let's stop at 3 today
now they also help me to become better manager

Good memory

I was told memory is not necessary anymore
memory has a rather bad reputation
it is related to memorizing, which we all had to do at school and what most of us hated
as a kid I was told that computers will let us find anything, so good memory is overrated
Google does not replace memory
you don't need to memorize all the standard library functions in PHP, remembering the ones you use regularly is enough
finding something online takes time
it's not a lot of time
bet repeated many times might be a lot of time
sometimes there's no time to search
during meetings or other conversations
good memory helps besides coding
remembering names of people in your company (and how to pronounce them correctly)
it helps building relations
remembering past decisions and reasons behind them
you don't need to remember everything
remembering algorithms is absolutely useless except for interviewing at companies which rely on remembering algorithms
you can write stuff down (I take a lot of notes and try to go back to them in the future)
use git commit messages and documentation to write down notes about the code

Practice

practicing recall technique
make notes, review the notes, recall the notes
learning things that will be used
e.g. learn and practice a new spoken language
it's like a muscle, the more you practice, the easier it gets to remember new things

Attention to details

I think this is one of the things that separate average developers from good developers
good developers immediately notice things that others miss
the reason is that in programming even one character, one typo can break everything
of course there are tests etc, but attention to detail goes way beyond that
thinking of edge cases is attention to detail
good developers ask questions like "and what happens when ... ?"
paying attention to user experience before implementation helps in reducing the time to getting feature done

Thinking ahead

maybe the most important on the list
especially important for lead devs and up, but helpful on every level
often when I see some code that does not look good, I want to change it
but then I don't have time to do that at once
so what I do is imagine how this code would look like if I had more time
then I imagine how to get these
and then I implement first step and over time I get to the state that I'm happy with
this helps also with planning projects
also with strategy for future development
the questions to ask are
where do we want to be
how do we get there one step at a time
example: I want to move our front-end from Angular to React
we might use micro front-ends approach
we might rewrite it all at once
we might run both apps together and add a layer of communication between them
each of these will take weeks if not months
so we need to know what is our goal and define steps to get there
the same might apply on a lower level
I have 10 classes that look almost the same
today I'll extract common part and I'll move 2 out of 10 classes to use the common class
later I'll be moving remaining classes whenever I have a chance