The role of developers has changed. It’s impossible for us to sit behind our glowing screens and type away the day. Now there is more emphasis on communication, getting involved and investing in the product we’re creating.

It's important to distinguish what your producing from lines of code to something more tangible, something you can get behind and be proud of. These are key realisations while learning effective communication skills.

This talk focuses on the skills a developer needs to work effectively and take their career to the next level, while having fun doing the thing they love the most - coding.

I’ll cover the following:

Why communication is important in Agile
Analysing problems and how to articulate them
Describing issues to none technical people
Achieving things through examples
Different types of people and how to effectively deal with them
Getting along with Management
Learning to say “NO!”
It’s ok to say “I don’t know”

I'll cover why they're all important in the work place and will help you become a better developer in the future.

I’ve presented this talk at DrupalCamp NW 2013 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zT6ptJ5pelc). An old version of my slides can be found at https://speakerdeck.com/mikebell/effective-communication-for-developers