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NICOLE: I am from Seattle,
and my name is Nicole.

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So my question is, I wanted to know what
are some of the common traits or skills

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that you notice in those
programmers who are

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considered to be top programmers,
or very skilled and advanced.

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What's something that you see
as the commonality they all

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have that you've noticed?

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That may be something I can look to
see if I can incorporate for myself.

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SPEAKER: Absolutely.

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A couple thoughts come to my mind.

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Let me go to Brian first,
though, for his, especially

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since he's been teaching multiple
classes this past semester.

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BRIAN: Yeah, this is a great question.

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I think, with really skilled
programmers that I've

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had the chance to interact
with and work with,

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I think some qualities they have are--

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one is, they're always trying to
find the best way to solve a problem.

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But oftentimes, ehrn you're dealing
with a computational problem,

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there are lots of options
you have for how to solve it.

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I often find that I really
admire people that are always

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looking for the fastest, to
the most memory-efficient,

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or just the most elegant way
to try to solve a problem.

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And I also know that
really skilled programmers

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are good at anticipating
possible edge cases.

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When you're writing
code, you have one sense

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for what you expect the code to
do, but very skilled programmers

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will often be able to think about
what could possibly go wrong,

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and to try to be able to
handle those situations.

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Because otherwise bugs may arise in
your programs later on down the line.

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SPEAKER: The first thought that
came to my mind was a good tendency,

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I think, for a good
programmer to have is

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a desire to want to
understand everything

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that's going on in their code, even if
they're using third party libraries.

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So case in point.

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One of CS50's own web applications
broke the other day, when none of us

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had actually touched the code recently.

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So it seemed a little strange.

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So we thought maybe that one of
the APIs we were using changed,

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or one of the libraries
ultimately changed.

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And through trial and
error, I realized that if I

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downgraded one of the
libraries we were using,

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everything started working again.

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And that was great.

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And I could have just saved
the code, pushed it to GitHub,

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and sort of called it a day.

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But I was so determined to want to
understand this that I dug in deeper.

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I asked Brian for his second
opinion, and indeed, Brian

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chased down the issue to being a very
small change in this other library.

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But it was so gratifying, and, I
think, enlightening for both of us,

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certainly for me, to realize,
oh, that's what happened,

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and that's why the code broke.

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And I think the opposite
of that is a bad trait.

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I think it's always disheartening
when we see in some of our students,

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or even some of our teaching
fellows, a sort of attitude of like,

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oh, I changed this line of code,
and I don't know how it fixed it,

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but it works now, and
being content with that.

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And I don't think you should be content
with not understanding lines of code

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that you wrote, or even any of the
dependencies that you might be using.

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So it's so frustrating
and it's so time-consuming

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to go down these rabbit
holes of understanding,

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but I think it really will make you
a better programmer, ultimately.

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