<commit_before>---
date: 2011-09-02
title: The Number One Trait of a Great Developer
---

bq. Maybe the best programmers aren't those who spectacularly solve crazy problems, but those who don't create them, which is much more silent. - "<NAME>":https://twitter.com/#!/kilaulena/status/111476233220530176

When I look around at other companies hiring Ruby on Rails developers, I see them focusing on three major traits: Super-smart; Large community following; Deep Ruby knowledge.  They're all wrong.  While these are great aspects in moderation, they all miss the number one quality of a fantastic developer:  *Judgement.*

h3. A story about Jack and Dianne

Jack is a Rockstar.  Jack talks about all the latest trends at all the coolest conferences around the world.  Jack makes a point of starting each project with at least three new technologies.  When asked to produce an internet-based backend for letting kitchen devices synchronize their list of recipes, Jack went to town.  The result was a combination of Google Protocol Buffers, node.js, and Casandra.  Elegant, scalable, and totally unmaintainable.  

Dianne is a good developer.  Dianne started as a Unix Admin, and moved into Ruby two years ago.  When asked to produce the same system, she immediately started asking questions:  

"How many devices do we expect to have?"
"Well, we hope to sell 500 in 12 months."<commit_msg>Fixed Cassandra typo<commit_after>---
date: 2011-09-02
title: The Number One Trait of a Great Developer
---

bq. Maybe the best programmers aren't those who spectacularly solve crazy problems, but those who don't create them, which is much more silent. - "<NAME>":https://twitter.com/#!/kilaulena/status/111476233220530176

When I look around at other companies hiring Ruby on Rails developers, I see them focusing on three major traits: Super-smart; Large community following; Deep Ruby knowledge.  They're all wrong.  While these are great aspects in moderation, they all miss the number one quality of a fantastic developer:  *Judgement.*

h3. A story about Jack and Dianne

Jack is a Rockstar.  Jack talks about all the latest trends at all the coolest conferences around the world.  Jack makes a point of starting each project with at least three new technologies.  When asked to produce an internet-based backend for letting kitchen devices synchronize their list of recipes, Jack went to town.  The result was a combination of Google Protocol Buffers, node.js, and Cassandra.  Elegant, scalable, and totally unmaintainable.  

Dianne is a good developer.  Dianne started as a Unix Admin, and moved into Ruby two years ago.  When asked to produce the same system, she immediately started asking questions:  

"How many devices do we expect to have?"
"Well, we hope to sell 500 in 12 months."
{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.05312275664034458, 'fraction_numerical': 0.02297200287150036, 'mean_word_length': 4.248587570621469, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 2, '<': 5, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 5, 'https://': 2, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 2, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
{'dir': 'git-commits-cleaned', 'id': '5527687', 'n_tokens_mistral': 759, 'n_tokens_neox': 694, 'n_words': 419}