Coding Horror: How To Become a Better Programmer by Not Programming
Sidenote: Derek, this is one of the many RSS feeds I read.
If you don’t have a subscription (RSS) to Jeff Atwood’s blog, get one. I love what he has to say. His reading list is superb… too bad I’ve never fully read any of those books. I can say I’ve at least touched half of the books on the list.
One thing I have to add to what he wrote:
You won’t– you cannot– become a better programmer through sheer force of programming alone. You can only complement and enhance your existing programming skills by branching out. Learn about your users. Learn about the industry. Learn about your business. The more things you are interested in, the better your work will be.
My efforts of trying to learn this programming language or that web framework is worthless, unless I realize why I’m doing it. This is why my focus is going to change back again to just creating.
I’ve been obsessing over preparation: Preparing through learning, through researching. I guess I could have also been preparing through doing, but that wasn’t the case. If I had actually been preparing through doing, I would have quickly gone past the preparation stage into the action stage.
In the end, what I’m trying to say is that while I have all these great ideas of creating a web application, I won’t get anywhere just by sitting back and passively learning. I gotta learn to walk the talk.
I’ve told some people that programming is slowly becoming a chore: I think this should be the case with a lot of programmers in general. I know what I want the computer to do. I know the quantifiable steps required to make this Turing complete contraption do what I want it to do. But all these syntax… bureaucracy… complexes…
Eh. I just gotta suck it up. And Dew it. I mean, do it.
Goodness, I miss caffeine.