Mental Toughness is the Best Quality a Developer Can Have

Programming isn’t just about writing code. It’s about solving problems, debugging, and spending hours trying to figure out why something doesn’t work when it should. You’ll hit walls. A lot.

It’s easy to get hung up on improving your coding skills. And yeah, that’s important. But here’s the thing: there’s always more to learn. There’s always a new framework, a new language, or a new tool. If you’re chasing mastery of every new thing that comes along, you’ll burn out. I’ve been there.

But if you’ve built resilience, you’ll roll with it. You’ll accept that not knowing everything is okay. You’ll focus on solving the problem with what you do know and trust that you can figure out the rest along the way.

Let me share a story. At a previous job, we were launching a feature that was key to our product. We pushed it to production, and boom—the system crashed. We had users depending on us, and I had to figure out what went wrong.

What did I do? First, I didn’t panic. I took a deep breath and started debugging. Turned out, we had a race condition in our code. Here’s a simplified example of what we were dealing with:

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// A simplified race condition example
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let usersCount = 0;
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function incrementUsers() {
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  // Multiple threads were updating the users count at the same time.
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  usersCount += 1;
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}
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setTimeout(incrementUsers, 100);

When two parts of the system try to update usersCount at the same time, the result becomes unpredictable. It took a while to figure out the issue, but staying calm and methodical is what got us to the solution. Mental toughness.

So how do you build this toughness? It’s not something that happens overnight, but there are a few things I’ve found helpful:

• Accept failure as part of the process.

If you’re learning, you’re failing. That’s just how it works. The faster you come to terms with this, the less stressful it becomes.

• Break problems into smaller pieces.

When you’re stuck, break the problem down. Focus on the first small thing you can fix and build momentum from there.

• Practice problem-solving under pressure.

Take on challenges that make you uncomfortable. Push yourself. The more you practice solving hard problems, the less daunting they become.

• Step away when needed.

Sometimes, walking away from a problem for a few minutes (or even hours) is the best way to clear your head. Come back fresh.

• Surround yourself with people who challenge you.

This one’s important. If you’re always the smartest person in the room, you’re not growing. Surround yourself with peers who push you to improve.

At the end of the day, the best developers aren’t necessarily the ones who know the most. They’re the ones who can keep moving forward when things get tough. Mental toughness is what will keep you going when the bugs pile up, the deadlines are tight, and everything seems like it’s going wrong.

So, if there’s one thing to focus on as a developer, I’d argue it’s not your coding skills, but your mindset. Build resilience. Build mental toughness. It’s the best tool you can have in your dev toolkit.