I intended it to be pretty open ended. Mostly interested in skills that are useful for _both_ solo and team work. I agree that there are some things that can be very useful for team work that are not as essential for solo work when it comes to programming. For example, being able to justify technical decisions to higher ups. Lots of communication skills are essential for teamwork.
I totally agree - I think I'm probably coming off as disagreeing with you though.
I think the difference for me is that the importance of communication for solo programming is a bit of a sliding scale depending on what your goals are. There aren't many exceptions when you work on a team. When I use the word importance, I'm tying it to a notion of necessity in relation to some goal. Team goals trump individual goals in organizations.
if you have no intention of making your code available for someone else to read / use / modify, the benefit for having readable code is really for yourself in six months and nobody else.
you also don't need to tell anyone what you're doing, so being able to clearly / succinctly explain what it is and why it's useful isn't a necessity. Does that make it an unimportant skill? No, it's just that the goals are different
I would extend the term "communication" to also include how we speak and listen to ourselves
I don't think I am able to explain it clearly without writing a very long post. There's a really good book by Marshal Rosenberg, titled non-violent communication, which gives a better explanation than I can right now. I would recommend it to pretty much anyone, if only for the very healthy way of treating oneself that it provides. Mileage may vary, but it fits my mental model pretty well
As an aside, I'm very glad to read through the replies to your post and see all the constructive you've engaged in. I've gotten mare than a few new thoughts and ideas because I chose to get involved in this post - thank you :)
