The Number 1 Attribute For Front End Web Developers!

Ok this post hits right home with me, as usual. Reason being I am writing off of inspiration but I realized there is one attribute or characteristic, however you want to refer to it, that every developer should have. I’m not gonna build up any suspension with this one. The one skill is….

Problem Solving.

I think if you can develop this one skill you can become a great web developer. Honestly this skill can translate into many disciplines. Especially in business this is the one thing employers want to know about you. They want to know in any situation or circumstance that you may come across how will you address your problem and what will you do to find a solution that not only helps you but can benefit others.

So because I spent the past 5 days working on one particular problem at work that I was STRUGGLING to overcome, or simply solve, I am truly writing on inspiration. So bear with me if my excitement seems to just jump onto the page. It’s hard to control when you feel like just conquered a mountain!

What Is Problem Solving And How To Develop The Skill?

I like to consider myself a story teller, or would like to be a better one, so before I begin into how to develop the skill of problem solving I will give a little background on this recent dilemma I encountered that seemed to just take every piece of my life and brain power to figure out how to come to a solution.

The story begins one Wednesday afternoon as a client called in about her WordPress blog and questioned why her blogs were linking to a 404 page. You know the dreaded 404 page that says “Oops page not found.” At first glance I thought to myself oh this is a simple fix. As I began to walk her through the process to the solution she showed me something that seemed abnormal. I had no worries though. As I took a quick glance I thought to myself once again “oh I know what is causing this problem. Again I thought to myself “simple fix”

Could I have been anymore wrong. Here is the setup the permalink that is created for each blog post was creating a random generated permalink and for some odd reason I was not able to edit or make any adjustments to it. Why you ask? Well for some reason the permalink settings on the WordPress dashboard was not allowing me access as well as no edit button to the permalink on the blog post page.

Ok so at this point I tried my first attempts to solutions to the problem. Now it  was time for some more detective work. I knew that there had to be some way to edit the permalink structure on the backend apart from the admin panel, even though I have not had any experience with it myself, but I knew there was a way.

My first question was what was causing this issue? I tried the standard protocol when a WordPress site encounters a problem which is usually plugins, but that wasn’t the case. I have never encountered a problem to this extent so I did what all developers and designers do…

They ask google lol

I don’t care who you are even if you have been a senior developer for years everyone needs reference and has had to ask google for a bug or an error at some point. It is true that google is your best friend. Unfortunately it seemed as google had something against me. Every blog article and every video seemed to be pointing me in the wrong direction or giving me the wrong answer. In fact, the solutions they gave me were routes I already tried and some suggested to change the code in .htaccess file and once again to no avail.

If you ever heard the saying about questions, the key to finding the answer is truly asking the “right” questions. In my exhaustive research I probably looked through every article and search I could find, but as a problem solver you need to be persistent. Again it took me 5 days to come to a solution. I knew that I was not done asking every question I could and today on the 5th day I found one video that helped me point me in the right direction to what was causing the issue.

Now that you heard my triumphant story of how I used my determination and persistence to find the solution I realized some things that helped me get here and I think understanding some of these concepts will take you a long way.

One thing when deciding to become a developer is knowing what your getting into. I will not lie to you, it’s hard and there are times you can get really frustrated but if you take your time and sometimes just step away from the problem you can approach it with a fresh pair of eyes.

So the one skill I believe that is highly valuable to develop your problem solving skill is the ability to persist till there is an answer. If you leave with anything from this post is that “there is always a solution” the thing is figuring out how to get to it. So I know when some people come against a problem they usually cave in or reach out to someone for help. I am not saying there is anything wrong in that, but have you really sat and thought to yourself that you could do this and figure out a soultion.

The goal in developing an ability to being a problem solver is how you persist through the problem. I wish I could put it in another way but its really quite simple. If your willing to be persistent and determined to sit through and until you get to a solution or an alternative solution to the problem. You have to make up in your mind that no matter what, you are drawing the line in the sand until you find a solution no matter how long it takes.

It’s as simple as that. The only way you begin to build a skill is through repetition. So any time you come across a problem just take the time to figure out a solution. Over time you will build your problem solving skills because you built up that muscle.

So the question to ask now is how will you address your problems. The beauty with learning how to code and becoming a web developer is that it is inevitable you will run into a problem. So put on your debugging shoes and face your problems head on and don’t be afraid to tackle them. As I said this is a skill that will transcend many disciplines and will help you in life as whole.