6 ms·
For the most part, the most important thing is to get things done. Sitting down and writing code. Nothing else. When you add all the fancy modern "methodologies
by zxcdw 14y ago
For the most part, the most important thing is to get things done. Sitting down and writing code. Nothing else. When you add all the fancy modern "methodologies" and tools, practices and whatnot then most, if not all of them just steer you away from the actual task of "sitting down and writing code". Of course, this is domain specific in a sense that agile methodologies aren't that suited for a sole developer, than they are for a team of developers or a group of teams. But in the end, the actual task of getting things done is just sitting down and writing code. Everything else is "wasted" time.
No matter how good heart rate monitors you have, how good shoes you have, how well nourished you are, how prepared you are, ... - you won't run your marathon any better if you aren't serious about the actual act of running. You can devise complex meditation practices and analyze your running stance and efficiency, but in the end it's the act of running which gets you through the 42195 meters of pain. The better you are at it, the faster you finish. Equipment helps, but only to a small degree.
Focus on working, getting stuff done.
- makecheck 14y agoWriting code is a straightforward task. What takes days or weeks is scanning and deciphering someone else's buggy digital hairball (and those programmers also thought they were "getting things done" when they "finished" their unmaintainable messes). I'm not a huge fan of IDEs or complex processes, but many tools do help. A debugger, static analyzer, and heck even 'grep', go a long way; really, anything that looks at the code is going to do some good. On the other hand, I find it useless to have processes that distort reality (e.g. pretty UML documents about what the code might do, if only someone had written the code that way).
- gizmo686 14y agogrep is the single most useful tool in my aresenal. With it, I can can take the source code of a library I have never looked up before, and immidietly find the function I want to know about, if I'm feeling nice, I might even submit a documentation update.
- gizmo686 14y agoThats just the attitude that put me out of running shape for two months, I ran to much, to fast, to soon, and get a stress fracture, and kept running on it until I got a worse stress fracture. The most difficult part of running is knowing how much to do in order to get better, without doing so much that you get worse. The same logic works in programmning, investing time so you know what you want to write not only lets you write it faster, but results in cleaner code that is easier to use, maintain, and likely has fewer bugs.
- zxcdw 14y agoYes, I've experienced the same when I began running. This is equivalent to a junior developer spouting out code without thinking. It's not only the act of actually physically typing the code, but the thought process involved - juniors are not able to think before they type. I'd argue that people like in the article have written more code, have spent more thinking, debugging and maintaining code than a huge, huge majority of "modern day hackers" ever will, in 21st century. They focused at the task at hand, and became extraordinary good at it.