What makes a good programmer?

After a good discussion of topic, Are you Experienced Programmer, I would like to start this new topic to discuss features of a good programmer/developer.

What I have seen from most of the new guys, they focus on coding part only. But today, definition of a programmer/developer is changing. You can be good at coding but if you miss in other areas, in my understanding, you are not a good developer.

Here are some of the key thing I focus:

1. Clean designer
Those days are long gone when you would expect a designer hand you out the page design. You need to focus on minor details, alignments, borders, colors and so on.

2. Crisp coder
If you copy and paste my code from Google, no good for me. There are always chances to improve any code and I mean any code. I need to see some extra effort besides copy and paste.

3. Killer Tester
You must be a killer tester. Before a tester finds your bugs, you must know them and kill them before deliverable.

Discuss your thoughts and qualities of a good programmer.

Here some more points, using which we can easily identify a good programmer during war room meetings

1. Thoroughly understand any technical issue 1st. Once you really understand the issue, fix will take very very less time and it will be robust too. Unfortunately majority of fixes are coming by without understanding the issue and such fixes are either just hiding the issue or genarting more issues
2. Think about final delivery rather than your present task. Else your delivery will produce panics for all modules during integration
3. Be innovative. i.e. you may create automated tools for yourself which will help your develoment tasks more easily, especially for any repetetive tasks.

 

One of the biggest challenges of being a good programmer is getting management to understand what they (management) needs to do to allow a programmer to be good.

Well said.
Any body else?