Comments on: Being a Better Developer

By: seantheflexguy

seantheflexguy — Fri, 29 May 2009 06:03:49 +0000

This is an awesome post. Thanks for gathering all of this info. Really, really great advice here.

By: Josh McDonald

Josh McDonald — Fri, 29 May 2009 02:54:35 +0000

Learn. Try. Teach.

You can write the best code in the world, but if you’re keeping it to yourself, you’re *not* a good coder.

By: TechKnow

TechKnow — Fri, 29 May 2009 00:12:47 +0000

@Paul – You are right, I boiled down and abstracted those results to axioms that are equally applicable to programmers or investment bankers. But I really think that if we follow these simple rules then we can be better Java programmers, Ruby programmers, or even investment bankers… The truth is that being better students makes us better programmers. If we learn how to learn, to see the patterns blindfolded, to navigate up and down the different layers or abstractions, to trouble shoot and debug code you never have seen before, to ask the right questions at the right time… all these things help us program no matter what language or technology stack you program in.

That said, I think you are right, there also needs to be more concrete examples specific to programming, or more specifically programming in a particular language. Given a particular language, say Ruby on Rails, we can break down Try New Things to include the following: update to latest Rails release, find new plugins, find new gems, use different Ruby frameworks, etc..

By: Paul W. Homer

Paul W. Homer — Thu, 28 May 2009 21:33:01 +0000

It’s a nice list and all, but doesn’t it apply to virtually everything? Knowing more about what you are doing usually translates into doing it better.

What might be more interesting are those things in the 70 million results that aren’t general; that apply to programming, but little else. Are the skills needed to build computer systems really that unique?

By: Chirantan

Chirantan — Tue, 26 May 2009 04:02:27 +0000

Wow! Great stuff. Thanks for this. :)