After all these years ..
-
After all these years as a programmer I still feel that I am not a good programmer. How will I become as good as the books say. I still do some mistakes I suffer from. I have some confidence, but these mistakes seem that they have become part of my personality.
-
After all these years as a programmer I still feel that I am not a good programmer. How will I become as good as the books say. I still do some mistakes I suffer from. I have some confidence, but these mistakes seem that they have become part of my personality.
Try to learn from your mistakes - the ones you learn from are the ones you don't repeat. If you repeat it, you didn't learn last time. Try to "detach" from the problem regularly. I find the doing something totally unrelated focuses my mind better and I see solutions and fixes when I am not thinking about them. But then, I suspect I'm weird. Look at the mistakes you do make. Are they all in the same area? Is it that you don't understand enough about that specific area? Would it help if you went back to the beginning and started again as if you have never heard of the subject, to get a fresh perspective? It is difficult to removed ingrained habits - that is one reason why I bang on (and on, and on) about parametrized queries, about not using VS default names, and (basically) doing things properly even if you are just writing a throw-away test. Because if you get into the habit of doing things the right way, it becomes second nature and you never do the stupid thing! :laugh: Can you submit for pair-working? Or code review? Sometimes, being told "No!" often enough is enough to stop us doing the wrong time again. Sorry if this is kinda generic, but without knowing you, and the mistakes you make, I can't be much else! :laugh:
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
-
Programming is one of those fields where if you don't get it wrong, you'll never get it right.
I wanna be a eunuchs developer! Pass me a bread knife!
Oh yes! If it don't blow up in your face, you are no-where close enough to the bleeding edge! Literally in one case. We were having trouble with a solenoid driver board not being "snappy" enough or being so snappy it "bounced" when fully open and closed a bit, so I tried changing the software to "Open" fully, then shut off immediately (before the solenoid had completed its travel) then slam it open again. The brilliant idea being that it would get accelerated, coast and then fully open. It was brilliant all right. You could see the silicon glowing inside the controller IC, until it blew the top off the chip and bounced it off my forehead...
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
-
Try to learn from your mistakes - the ones you learn from are the ones you don't repeat. If you repeat it, you didn't learn last time. Try to "detach" from the problem regularly. I find the doing something totally unrelated focuses my mind better and I see solutions and fixes when I am not thinking about them. But then, I suspect I'm weird. Look at the mistakes you do make. Are they all in the same area? Is it that you don't understand enough about that specific area? Would it help if you went back to the beginning and started again as if you have never heard of the subject, to get a fresh perspective? It is difficult to removed ingrained habits - that is one reason why I bang on (and on, and on) about parametrized queries, about not using VS default names, and (basically) doing things properly even if you are just writing a throw-away test. Because if you get into the habit of doing things the right way, it becomes second nature and you never do the stupid thing! :laugh: Can you submit for pair-working? Or code review? Sometimes, being told "No!" often enough is enough to stop us doing the wrong time again. Sorry if this is kinda generic, but without knowing you, and the mistakes you make, I can't be much else! :laugh:
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
OriginalGriff wrote:
Try to "detach" from the problem regularly. I find the doing something totally unrelated focuses my mind better and I see solutions and fixes when I am not thinking about them.
I often have an epiphany at the urinal.
OriginalGriff wrote:
But then, I suspect I'm weird.
Would you want to be any other way?
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
-
Oh yes! If it don't blow up in your face, you are no-where close enough to the bleeding edge! Literally in one case. We were having trouble with a solenoid driver board not being "snappy" enough or being so snappy it "bounced" when fully open and closed a bit, so I tried changing the software to "Open" fully, then shut off immediately (before the solenoid had completed its travel) then slam it open again. The brilliant idea being that it would get accelerated, coast and then fully open. It was brilliant all right. You could see the silicon glowing inside the controller IC, until it blew the top off the chip and bounced it off my forehead...
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
-
OriginalGriff wrote:
Try to "detach" from the problem regularly. I find the doing something totally unrelated focuses my mind better and I see solutions and fixes when I am not thinking about them.
I often have an epiphany at the urinal.
OriginalGriff wrote:
But then, I suspect I'm weird.
Would you want to be any other way?
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
Nope. But I've worked hard to be who I am. And to change one thing would be to not be "me" anymore. :laugh:
The universe is composed of electrons, neutrons, protons and......morons. (ThePhantomUpvoter)
-
After all these years as a programmer I still feel that I am not a good programmer. How will I become as good as the books say. I still do some mistakes I suffer from. I have some confidence, but these mistakes seem that they have become part of my personality.
Every time you make a mistake, learn from it. Even better, when you see other people have made a mistake (often painfully obvious if you work in legacy code or with other developers), learn from that, too. Do some reading around the areas you find yourself making mistakes most often, to see if there are patterns or habits you can learn that would help you. Pick up some higher level design approaches: good programming is mostly about working out what code needs to be written, not actually writing it, and avoiding a mistake at the design stage can save you a lot of pain trying to code the wrong thing.
-
After all these years as a programmer I still feel that I am not a good programmer. How will I become as good as the books say. I still do some mistakes I suffer from. I have some confidence, but these mistakes seem that they have become part of my personality.
-
After all these years as a programmer I still feel that I am not a good programmer. How will I become as good as the books say. I still do some mistakes I suffer from. I have some confidence, but these mistakes seem that they have become part of my personality.
I used to think I had stopped getting better but I think we just have natural phases where it's like that. You're probably subconciously learning something important which is taking a while. One day you'll wake up and it will just be easier and very difficult to explain why. There is of course always more to learn and it's the nebulous stuff about the choices we make as write that is seldom found in any book that is the hardest to learn and probably the most important.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage." Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
-
If you ever get to the point where you think you are not making mistakes then you have merely stopped realising you are making them. That would be far more dangerous.
“I believe that there is an equality to all humanity. We all suck.” Bill Hicks
... or you are doing the same things the same way, over and over. Sounds not exactly pleasant either.
