Comments on: What programming concepts I should master to have a deep understanding of my craft?

By: isomorph

isomorph — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 05:48:39 +0000

bookmarked and etched in stone above my monitor so i will never forget. ;-) thanks, mate, for reminding us all of the essentials.

By: Mike Johnson

Mike Johnson — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 04:23:34 +0000

I really enjoyed this. Often, when someone asks "what do I need to be a good programmer", the answers that ensue contain nothing but a checklist of technologies, and the "virtues" of a good programmer often get overlooked.

By: LachlanB

LachlanB — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 00:25:14 +0000

That’s a good point Raphael – I didn’t mention optimization, and should have. I did mention “know what’s going on under the hood” which did imply this, but I didn’t mentioned it. It’s obviously important to make sure you’re not doing stupid things (making 100 hundreds of web service calls, allocating stupid amounts of memory, thrashing the disk etc) – but far too often programmers place a much too high priority on efficiency of code. Optimizing individual lines of code sounds like overkill – I’d be making sure that the overall solution is sensible first before diving into the details, and only then doing it if there was actually a performance problem. For example I’ve found that programmers love to optimise their application code but hate optimising their SQL queries, which are normally the root cause of their performance problems.

By: Raphael

Raphael — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:54:21 +0000

No, I'm not talking about optimizing individual lines of code (begone, C zombie!), but about writing resource-efficient programs. In order to do that, one needs a modicum of knowledge about algorithms and data structures, and the way computers work.

Sadly, there is so much inefficient application code out there, all too often under the guise of fancy development paradigms and hyped technology. (Lightning, I'm looking at you!)

And no, none of the other code-niceness metrics mentioned in the post imply efficiency (often the opposite -- it's trade-off time!).

By: stellarvortex

stellarvortex — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 07:17:26 +0000

It seems to me that most of it is, if efficient code is code that does its job in a good way, and can take on new responsibilities without too much effort. If you think that efficient code is optimized statements, you probably have a long way to programmer's nirvana...

By: Raphael

Raphael — Fri, 08 Mar 2013 06:54:43 +0000

Nothing here about writing efficient code. Go figure.

By: Shree Mandadi

Shree Mandadi — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 16:26:57 +0000

Know your Questions - After mastering these techniques, There still would be a few more situations, when you don't know what your friends are talking about. For those situations, and turn the discussion in your favor, Ask the right questions, and Fine tune the topic of conversation to move your strong hold. Asking the right questions gets your in the know circle

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 07:23:03 +0000

I'd add to the above with learn fundemental data structures and how to leverage them. The book Porgramming Pearls goes into this as does one of Syncfusion's Succintly series. I met a programmer recently who was a great improviser, had five years experience and then turned round and honestly said he'd never found a need to use an array or a list.

If he had the code I was reviewing would have been shorter, easier to maintain and probably a bit faster. He'd also have learnt to use his language ideomatically, as was intended for the version-something I'm learning in F# as well as VB as common tasks become much simpler. For example using for each instead of counting index values - in the same line en being able to tag a chunk of LINQ on the end avoiding extra conditionals in the loop.

By: LachlanB

LachlanB — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 22:03:14 +0000

Looks interesting Adam! Is it just an advanced notepad?

By: Adam Rhodes

Adam Rhodes — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 13:34:14 +0000

What a great read for my lunch hour. As for your last question regarding actually doing stuff, have you had a look at GTD (Getting Things Done) before? I've just started trying to use this methodology in my life using a web based GTD solution called NirvanaHQ.