Eight traits to work on to be the best engineer you can be

I came across this TED talk presented by Richard St. John almost fourteen years ago and thought it was interesting. A fairly thorough guide on becoming successful and famous. I did not have the desire to become super famous or rich and thought the concepts he presented would only be applicable towards that end so I did not think to implement his advise. Fourteen years later, some years working as a software engineer, a question pops up in my mind. That question was "what do I work on if I want to become the best software engineer that I can be?" That seems straight forward at first because you can google search the latest tech trends/tricks and pluck any one out of a hat and do some tutorial course or toy project with it. Does that really make someone a better engineer though? If you take some very good engineers in the past like Kent Beck or Steve Wozniak for example, is that what characterized them? I don't think so.

From that point on I was fascinated with the internal qualities of what it means to be the best you can be. I researched and looked into many self help resources that are currently popular. I was not happy with their quality of content (or lack thereof). Then I remembered that Richard St. John gave a pretty good talk and I could not find any holes or issues with what he was recommending. I bought his book, read through it, and now I aim to present some good advice tailored specifically for software engineers and how I personally am applying them.

I will be doing an 8 part series going into each trait development more in depth.

Here is an amazon affiliate link to his book for anyone interested in reading the material. Any purchase made through that link supports this blog.