“Why do you need to learn other skills/technologies apart from your main one…” – as a python developer.
Here are some things I learned at my job, as a python developer. I never understood the importance of learning extra skills & technologies apart from my main one until I got my first job.
These are some technologies & tools that I had to work with, not necessarily on a day-to-day basis, but occasionally when the work was assigned to me. Keep in mind, my exact designation at work was “Python Developer”.
SQL (MYSQL)
It's pretty much impossible for you to never encounter a SQL task at work if you are a developer. When I started the job, I was only working with Python for the backend development of our project. As I gained experience, I was assigned other tasks that didn’t include just Python.
For example, creating/updating python scripts that allowed —
- Connecting to remote databases and copying/moving data across.
- Updating the data based on the requirements.
These aren’t the only type of tasks I had to do, but you get the idea. Being able to write SQL queries was really a necessity for me at that time. And, a good amount of knowledge was required, as the code was kind of lengthy and complex. It required many JOINS to be used in conjunction with one another.
So, that was my first point.
Practice SQL.
Understand how you can connect to databases via a python script.
Practice by making a script yourself that connects to a database & create functions in your script that perform various operations on that data.
JavaScript (jQuery)
At first, the majority of the tasks at work were focused on just the python backend… Creating views, models, signals e.t.c.
In between development, I also had to create the frontends for the things I was working on. That required a lot of JavaScript or jQuery knowledge to perform.
After a while, most of the backend stuff was complete and we kept working on just the UI part for the project. Going back & readjusting it according to the client's needs. That was all possible only with some CSS, HTML & JS knowledge.
I can’t tell you how important jquery/js turned out to be for me at my job. Not only mine, but later on I was working on other projects with my teammates where they also needed some extra hands for their frontend tasks and I was the one they’d call for that.
But that is just me. You might not need a lot of js knowledge for your job. But, it never hurts to learn it & if one day the need arises, you will be well prepared!
MS Office Or Other Editing Suites (Minimal file editing)
This is optional & you already might be great at it but still, I will mention it here.
I rarely had to work with PDFs or word files directly from the text editors such as MS Word. Mostly, the work involved creating PDFs & DOCs via python code.
On a few occasions, however, I had to directly work with documents in the text editors or processors. Tasks would include matching up or creating a word file based on the client's example file or adjusting a python generated word file to make it better.
Again, this is pretty basic but, still, I am mentioning it here so that in case you aren’t someone who is used to working with such text editors or editing suites then you can try & learn the basics so that it doesn’t become a problem at work.
Unless your team has dedicated members who are proficient at the particular problem at hand, you must have the capability to perform tasks that may be out of your area of expertise.
You don’t have to be an expert at everything. Rather, be aware of the various other techniques and tools that are being used around you. Get some practice with those tools & I am sure someday that small amount of knowledge will come in handy.
That is it. I want to keep this post short. I can talk about other specific technologies that I encountered at my job but that would be targeted only towards “Python Developers”.
As I just want to mention some basic or general skills you must possess, I won’t write that here.
