experts are made, not born – Scientific American

Disclaimer: This post is devoted to a person who wants to become an expert – the top player in a specific field as programming, soccer or chess. This post will be not interesting for people who are satisfied with their current performance and not interested to be the best.

If you want to become an expert, it is not enough to follow your work assignments or occasionally play with interesting stuff at home. You have to push yourself hard in specially designed way.

@Work
Your paid work tasks and projects are not designed to make you an expert. Your company expects results from your work: reliable, with minimal mistakes and focused on the company main goal – make money. Your employer could provide minimal training to help you with job requirements. However, your growth will be constrained by company needs, timelines, work assignments and acceptable methods. We cannot blame our organizations – this is part of the deal – they pay for your work and expect specific results. But… is this the best way for you to become an expert, acquire new skills and gain knowledge? To become an expert, you have to make many mistakes, learn from them, experiment with alternatives and work hard on your weaknesses. How many organizations do allow this risky, unproductive and unreliable way of working?

@Home
Your play at home with interesting stuff has problems too. To satisfy your programming instincts and curiosity, you will probably select what you enjoy to do and eager to try. You’ll immense in this activity and find great satisfaction from doing it. But…  is this the best way to become an expert by doing only what you like? Becoming an expert requires hard, sometimes unpleasant work, specifically designed to improve your performance and push you over comfort zone. Read full post >>

A really great talent finds its happiness in execution. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

source

Qualities of well composed code:

1. Quick discovery and understanding of programming logic and components
2. Clear organization (for human brains)
3. Ease of reuse, modification and evolution
4. Close connection between customer ideas and system implementation

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I was always against Copy and Paste programming. I condemned people who use this practice as discrediting the honorable profession of The Programmer. This evil activity inflates application code without adding anything useful. This shameful practice causes various complications – more code, more things to remember, needless complexity, and difficulty to manage and synchronize related changes in the future. But at some point, I admitted to myself – things are not so black and white. I do Copy and Paste in my code, it is difficult to resist this seductive activity.

The only indulgence is that I’m very keen to eliminate bad effects of Copy and Paste before finishing my task.

I use two main approaches for writing new code. The first is Top-Down – I have clear design ideas how I should program and I know what classes and components to use. I go ahead and write code from scratch using my memory and power of intellect :). There are few problems with this approach. Unfortunately, my memory is not so great and knowledge is not so vast. Regularly I have new tasks that I don’t know or don’t remember how to program. Sometimes I don’t get immediately what other people programmed without debugging. And often I want to save time and avoid re-implementing the same idea again. And that is why I also use the second approach – Bottom-Up. I copy and paste code first. And after I figure out how this code works, how to use, fit and improve it. Read full post >>

Pair Programming is a great way to build software systems. When Pair Programming works, it has significant benefits:

• better ideas – continuous brainstorming, larger knowledge pool, less gaps in understanding and more brain power to solve design problems;
• better quality – fewer bugs, instant validation of ideas, consistent approach and stricter adherence to team conventions;
• better knowledge – experience and knowledge sharing, deeper understanding of why, how and what was done;
• increased productivity – better focus and higher intensity, pushing each other and motivating to achieve best results, less procrastination and wasting of time;
• more enjoyment – most people like to work in groups and solve together interesting problems.

Extreme Programming leaders insist that all significant development should be done in pairs. But can we say that Pair Programming is the best method in all situations?

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Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. – Antoine De Saint Exupery

The approach to programming is concerned with finding the best ways to translate programmer’s intention into the good system design and code.

The programming is communication. The programmer continuously add, change and refine ideas in the code. Source code has two important goals: tell a computer what to do and tell people what the computer should do. The program code is the only true medium for storing and communicating ideas about the software system behavior. Quality of the ideas expression in the code directly affects overall quality of the system.

So, what are characteristics of the good code?

1. clear – easier to work with ideas;
2. minimal – less effort to understand and change ideas;
3. testable – easier to validate ideas.

These are 6 top reasons for bad design and code:

1. lack of expertise
2. unrestrained technical curiosity and creativity
3. missing big picture: system purpose and customer goals
4. blindly following popular methods and over-using technology
5. sloppiness; lack of attention to details
6. over-complicating design to have more work or increase job security

The programmer can write better code (and avoid most of these problems) by improving programming style and approach.

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“I made this program longer than usual because I lack the time to make it shorter.” – paraphrasing Blaise Pascal

The Elements of Pragmatic Programming Style is the collection of rules for pragmatic programmers. This collection doesn’t pretend to be comprehensive guide how to program. Rather it concentrates on fundamentals: how any programmer can build better software for the customer. Some of the rules are obvious, but, surprisingly, many programmers don’t even think about them. They make same mistakes over and over again. I hope this post will inject a healthy dose of pragmatism into your programming style and make it a bit better .

Style Components:

• Intention – understand your task and how to get it done
• Approach – basic principles of writing code
• Composition – organization of code
• Expression – expressing ideas in code
• Object Oriented Pragmatic Style

The goals of Pragmatic Programming Style are

1. Building reliable software fast.
2. Delivering maximum value for the customer.
3. Writing code that is easy to understand, change and share.

Intention

“Everyone hears only what he understands.” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Understand your task and how to get it done

Sidereal
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“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you are heading.” – Lao Tzu

Software teams have three main strategies to achieve success: retreat, evolution or revolution.

• Retreat – refusal to act or the art of knowing when to say NO. 
• Evolution – continuous improvement and generation of ideas stemmed from existing set of ideas.
• Revolution – rapid advance with radical and disruptive ideas, overhaul of existing core ideas.

How can software teams choose the best strategy? They should consider three components:

1. The Players
2. The Game
3. The Dynamics

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Can in-house software programmers become extinct?

Companies spend millions dollars  on in-house software development. There is no easy escape for business – they must use software in today world. Companies need in-house programmers for specific for their businesses applications and pay hefty ransom. But will it continue forever? Companies are not happy. And there are few trends that can put in danger a large population of in-house programmers:

• customizable commercial and open-source software for conventional needs as accounting, CRM, CMS, etc.
• outsourcing  to specialized consulting software companies
• growth of domain specific languages and workbenches  that allow business experts to build software.
• development of AI that can replace programmers, e.g. neural networks, expert systems, evolutionary computation.

Thought experiment

Lets imagine the worst scenario. Suppose the dark day came – somebody invented a machine that can program. Non-programmers can use the machine for building software for their business needs. Technical knowledge and programming skills are no longer needed – just tell machine what you want and get a software program. Will it be the end of in-house programmer’s era?         Read full post >>

What does produce better ideas in software development – revolution or evolution? Revolution is a rapid triumph of the new ideas and breaking open of the old concepts. Evolution is the process of small frequent changes to improve and adapt to environment. The main difference – revolution replaces old ideas with the new promising unproven ideas, evolution gradually and continuously improves existing working ideas.

We often face this dilemma in software development – should we enhance existing features and improve the ways we work or should we instead come up with something radical and revolutionary.

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Recently I’ve been thinking that Software Development is a game. The goal of this game is to discover and implement the best solution for customer’s needs. There are other important goals as making money, empowering business or keeping people happy, but they matter less for the purpose of the game.

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