What's Your Superpower?

While we may spend most of our day as mild mannered Shoeshine Boy, each and every one of us should be able to put on our cape and become Underdog when the need calls for it.  In time, experience begins carving out our very own toolkit, one that we have honed over the years and we alone can wield with mastery.  Our very own superpower.

On average, we are all average but we each have our very own areas of expertise; things we perform more proficiently than most, perhaps more proficiently than anyone else.  Perhaps you pick up new technology faster than your peers, perhaps refactoring is your bag, or perhaps you are wield Python like a katana, slicing and dicing data like Julie Childs diced onions.

Sometimes these superpowers are developed as part of your job and at the time you may very well use them with average skills.  As time passes on, your peers disperse and these tools become increasingly rare in your newly founded teams.  Once average, you become exceptional at this particular skill.

Lately, I find I've dusted off a once average GDB debugging skill, one that nearly every one of my peers were proficient in nearly 20 years ago, but lately seems to be a hard-to-find skill in recent company.  Pairing GDB with Python I've recently demonstrated proficiency in generating multi-process message-trace-diagrams to gain significant understanding of how legacy systems behaves.  To the astonishment of my boss, it appears that this is my superpower given none of the remaining team has proficiency in such tooling.

So, what's your superpower?  Find it, hone it and wield it....it'll make you extraordinary.