Traits of a Good Developer

There are a few things I think are essential to being a good developer. I'm probably parroting Joel Spolsky here, but I wanted to get them down while they're fresh in my mind:

Exposure to more than one platform and language

If your only experience is with one language on one platform (i.e., perl on Linux, C# on Windows, etc.), this is a signal to me that you're inflexible and not willing to stretch yourself to do new things. It's definitely uncomfortable to do try new languages and OSes, but that's the only way to stretch yourself and get better.

Exposure to pointers

Lack of exposure to pointers is one of Joel's pet peeves and I've adopted it as one of mine as well. Where I went to school, Java was the language of choice for freshman year CS courses. This was a bad decision since the first sophomore year course was Architecture and Assembly language, something which Java does precious little to prepare you for.

When I first started in industry, my first language again was Java and then C#. Another bad experience, since this left me with a rather steep learning curve for my next experience, working with low-level C++ code on HP-UX. But, to tie in with my previous point, I specifically went after this position because I saw a gaping hole in my experience and wanted to fill it in. And I'm much better off for it. I'm confident with my feel for how memory is being managed and manipulated during the course of a program's execution, be it managed, unmanaged, embedded or desktop.

But I sure wish I'd had the low-level introduction to C in my first year as a CS student.

Exposure to things that are not code

I'm talking about documentation, gathering requirements, interacting with users and customers, creating a design document or diagram. These are the things that you will most certainly not learn in college, and they're definitely not as fun as just coding all day, but they're essential to being anything more than a coding monkey.

There's probably more that I'm forgetting, but if I'm going to interview you or be interviewed by you, these are the big things I'm going to be looking for besides competency with your hard skillset.