Don't Throw All At Once

Most developers I met, lacking off various valuable soft skills. I’m not talking about some mantra like “be right guy in the office”, I’m talking about skills like diagramming, presenting, and other skills that help us in our work. Let’s stop on presenting skills here. The best stuff I learned so far about it is to don’t throw all at once and be a pinpoint at the problem. Let me explain how it will impact you.

Presenting is a skill that you need to actively master as a software developer. But when you’re presenting your ideas, keep your point very specific and please just don’t throw all the facts you want to say.

It’s better to say less, but more specific, strictly connected to one point. Create a general idea for your keynote and inject it going through the whole speech.

Here are the areas where it can be applicable:

Architecting

Instead of showing the full picture, create a simple design pieces and deliver them continuously. Your team will learn and puzzle faster, simply because design sketches will be specific and granular for each task. Instead of showing how smart you are, focus on a problem.

Teaching

When it comes to mentoring somebody, I’m also making this mistake quite often. Day to day you need to deliver a little bit of new information. Otherwise, your students will be overwhelmed of disconnected in their mind facts.

Conference Talks

Being in the conference talk, you need to be specific on one thing as only you can. Thus, people can better understand your ideas, instead of just shrug and walk away.

If you are a senior developer, you have to know how to deliver your ideas to many people in front of you.