Comprehension - a developer skill you need

I've been a professional frontend developer for a couple of years now. There are few skills that I have picked up the hard way. This post is for highlighting one of those skills.

Comprehension, as a web developer today, it is one of the most important skills a developer could have in his/her arsenal but is sadly neglected most of the time. Fast changing technologies and an explosion of javascript frameworks, is making it harder to stay on rigid and legacy languages (languages that are taught in schools with books written on them). In the age of the shared economy, web developers have to share their resources and depend on other developers' resources. Even though package managers are making it easier to install and publish packages over the internet, smooth distribution doesn't guarantee usefulness.

Most packages are accompanied with great documentation but incomplete knowledge and ignorance always go hand in hand. It's really hard to stay away from them. Comprehension will help where documentation doesn't.

The most important rule for using a piece of code from the internet is to read it through multiple times and if you ever feel otherwise, read this rule again.

Packages over the internet are made by the developers for the developers, authors mostly cover all important details in documentation. Comprehensive reading of the documentation is more than enough to get you started. Few people have the time to read or write documentation but it has a purpose, a little comprehension on both side will make it useful.

Every time you feel like giving up on a module, snippet of code, stackoverflow answer or a language for that matter, one more read is perhaps all that you need.