Are you a detail oriented developer ?

I have narrowed down this topic in my title. "Detail Oriented" vs "Big Picture" is a debatable topic and both has its own benefits and drawbacks depending upon the nature of work and context. Depending upon your nature of work or role you may need to strike a right balance.

The amount of self satisfaction you get by the end of the day when you fix things by understanding thoroughly or knowing its details is tremendous.

As a developer, I suggest you to be more on the Detail Oriented side. I wasn't a detail oriented developer always and I still I miss it many times. It is very rare that you would always work on a product or a project from the beginning where you start from the design. Most of the times whichever organisation or project you end up with, reverse engineering work is more what you do than the actual software development. In such cases doing the following things leave you without knowing the details forever,

• Whenever you have to debug an error or fixing the problem, using google search and landing in stackoverflow. There is nothing wrong in that. But how you read the solutions provided there and incorporating in your application matters. I have seen many developers doing the copy paste of the solutions and check if it fix the problem. If it doesn't fix the problem then continue doing the same with the different solutions mentioned in the discussion chain.
• Fixing the application error with the trial and error approach with or without depending on technical blogs. Keep changing the code with out understanding much about the details and check if it resolves the problem.

Tips for grooming yourself as a detail oriented developer,

• Inculcating the habit of reading an API documentation.
• Reading the complete details of the exception stack trace or the error and try to understand.
• If you have relevant books, then I strongly suggest you to go to the specific topic, read and understand fully. e.g: If you are troubleshooting an ActiveMQ connection issue it is better to read the details of the connection protocol you are using either STOMP or TCP. 

As a developer, if you can constantly practice these while you do development as well as troubleshooting an old application,

• You will see yourself more confident. 
• The amount of self satisfaction you get by the end of the day when you fix things by understanding thoroughly or knowing its details is tremendous.
• These habits will groom yourself as a strong technical person where you can choose your career path as a software architect or if you prefer to go for a managerial role, again it will greatly help as you can always inspire your team by assisting them in technical difficulties whenever needed.