The best Programmers I Know – Matthias Endler

Summary

Published on 4th of April, 2025 · Updated on 7th of April, 2025The Best Programmers I KnowI have met a lot of developers in my life. Lately, I asked myself: “What does it take to be one of the best? What do they all have in common?”In the hope that this will be an inspiration to someone out there, I wrote down the traits I observed in the most exceptional people in our craft. I wish I had that list when I was starting out. Had I followed this path, it would have saved me a lot of time. Read the ReferenceIf there was one thing that I should have done as a young programmer, it would have been to read the reference of the thing I was using. I.e. read the Apache Webserver Documentation, the Python Standard Library, or the TOML spec.Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written.Great devs understand the technologies they use on a fundamental level.It’s one thing to be able to use a tool and a whole other thing to truly grok (understand) it. A mere user will fumble around, get confused easily, hold it wrong and not optimize the config.An expert goes in (after reading the reference!) and sits down to write a config for the tool of which they understand every single line and can explain it to a colleague. That leaves no room for doubt!To know a tool well, you have to know:its history: who created it? Why? To solve which problem?its present: who maintains it? Where do they work? On what?its limitations: when is the tool not a good fit? When does it break?its ecosystem: what libraries exist? Who uses it? What plugins?For example, if you are a backend engineer and you make heavy use of Kafka, I expect you to know a lot about Kafka – not just things you read on Reddit. At least that’s what I expect if you want to be one of the best engineers. Read The Error MessageAs in Really Read the Error Message and Try to Understand What’s Written. Turns out, if you just sit and meditate...