If you are a business guy, finding and working with a developer can be a daunting task. Having a developer who understands your vision and works diligently to make that a reality is unfortunately rare. Here are a few characteristics of a good developer:

• Actively listens to your requirements and then remembers them by making notes. Keeping track of details is one of most important things in engineering and good developers will do that instinctively without you having to ask.

• Advices you not just on technical things but also typical business requirements. Developers typically have a wide range of experience working with various applications and they develop an acute sense of what works.

• Prepares a project plan before getting into coding and implementation. Any decently sized software project quickly becomes huge list of things which are under various states of progress: urgent things, planned items, things to do in future and things you are considering but are not sure etc. A good plan is crucial, almost like a compass, in keeping the project on the track.

• Is available 24×7 for any production related issues. Of course, even developers need to sleep. But, responsible developers will wake up in middle of the night and fix that bug if required.

• Answers emails and messages promptly. A good developer will even go a step further and ask you for a regular conference to provide you status updates proactively.

• Honest about mistakes and avoids surprises. Software projects by nature are complex and there are mistakes. Fortunately, they are mostly recoverable. However, you should definitely know about it so that you can assess the state of the project and predict the future progress realistically.

• Lets you know about holidays and other days-off well in advance so that you are aware of the pace of the project.

• Sends you an invoice regularly. Good developers are proud of their work and so not shy to charge fairly for it. They are also organized to a fault so they maintain a routine of sending you regular invoices. Its good for you as well since you know about your costs accurately rather than being surprised at the end.

Of course, a lot of other people have also written on this topic. Here are some notable ones:

On the Bangalore OCC mailing list which has a fantastic mix of entrepreneurs, consultants, VCs and like, somebody while advising to be careful while hiring web developers commented: “Web development is not… one time development…”. That got me thinking: Web development is still tricky. Yes, we do have our productive frameworks and tried agile methodologies, but there is still something which makes developing a web application inherently hard.

Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter. — Winston Churchill

Recently, an article bubbled up in delicious popular that caught my eye: Why I Don’t Mind Maintenance Programming

As the author notes, almost every developer wants to work on a new project. So much so that, it is invariably brought up in job interviews either by companies to sell their position or by candidates trying to decide whether to take up an offer. I was no different when I graduated from college and was duly disappointed when couple of months into my first job I realized I would be doing maintenance of several legacy systems. Only later did I realize the whole lot of good that it did to me:

My wife once told me about her first lecture in Computer Science back in her college days. The teacher walked in and started talking about history of computers, data, files, computer languages and “lots of other hyperbole”. She didn’t understand anything out of the one hour lecture. Soon after that, she switched to Political Science.

I have heard similar stories of people getting a rough introduction to computers. That got me thinking about how I got introduced to computers. I remember in my very first class (I was 12 then), my teacher Mr. Jhulan Chakraborty started by explaining what a computer is. What he said, stayed with me ever since: