When we think about the skills required by developers, we never consider the soft skill to present an idea to others. This is not something easy to train, but it is definitely something that can be trained.
Drawing
One of the most important features is to sketch some visual representation of your idea. The most used (and my best recommendation) is draw.io. It has a lot of easy-to-use features, a large library with Cloud provider symbols that will make your sketch shine, and of course, it is free. It also integrates with Confluence ( the Wiki in JIRA), so you can also use it to write documentation for your tasks.
The second recommendation here is another free online tool called Excalidraw. This one does not have a lot of exterior images, but it is the simplest and most productive one. You have to focus only on the content, no time to waste with cosmetics. This one is my favorite to use in video calls.
Text editing in MD
Another great-to-have skill you have to learn is adding some MarkDown visual elements to your texts. This is especially useful in your README.md files, but nowadays even Slack and Confluence support some markdown features.
Besides adding images to your texts, you can include special formatting for variables and code blocks, different types of lists, and even tables.
A nice place to get started is the website Markdownguide .
Gifs (but not for memes)
Sometimes taking pictures is just not enough. A nice tip, if you already don’t know this, is that both MacOS and Windows ( starting from 10 ) have native ways to capture images. In the Mac it is the Shift + Command Key + 4, you crop the area of your screen you want to take the shot and it saves to your Desktop Area.
In Windows, you have to press Shift + Alt + S, and the screenshot is saved in the clipboard, so you have to either paste it directly where you want it with CTRL+V or create a new image and save it ( I like using Paint.net on Windows because it is free and when you click on new image with the image saved in the clipboard, the dimensions of the new image are filled automatically).
Now, talking about animated GIFs, there are some nice free options out there, and the one I have used the most is LICEcap. It is free, easy to use, etc.
Short (or not) Videos
If you never recorded yourself for any reason, you probably have not heard of THE best software for recording out there: OBS Studio. Of course, it is free, easy to use, and the preferred choice for the vast majority of streamers out there.
There is one catch when recording videos: the audio you get in your original recording is usually very bad. So, you can either upload it to YouTube and hope you get good results from the automated treatment that YouTube does, or you can try to fix it yourself using an audio software like Audacity.
If you do this, you will of course need another software to edit your video and replace the existing sound with the one you just created. I have used ShotCut to do this in the past, but it is not very easy to understand so you will probably need to read some tutorials to work on it.
