In Thoughts / Tags: New Year's Resolution, self improvement /
At the end of last year I made a blog post entitled New Year’s Resolution? Be A Better Coder. In that post, I detailed three key areas in which I hoped resolved to improve. June came and went (and I forgot to post this) so here’s my progress thus far.
1. Read More
The Idea: There is so much knowledge in both books and online. It would be a worth the effort to take in some of this collective knowledge.
The Goal: My goal is to read three books this year (one every four months) and subscribe to ten good blogs.
The Progress: All done! I read Practices of an Agile Developer and wrote my review. I finished, Software Optimization Cookbook and published a review for that as well. Finally, I completed Best Kept Secrets of Peer Code Review and I’m almost finished writing the review. As for blogs, my Reader is to the brim with new items. It is hard to keep up!
2. Learn a New Language
The Idea: Every language is a tool in the toolbox. Learning more tools and maintaining a repertoire of them would be most beneficial.
The Goal: My goal is to learn and implement a few solutions in Python and in Perl.
The Progress: More python scripts. Still no Perl scripts. The usual. Implemented a few more things in Python.
3. Be an Architect
The Idea: Where a programmer applies some duct tape to stop a leak, an architect replaces the pipeline with a better one. This is most essential to career advancement.
The Goal: My goal here was a little more extract. It was a promise to leave things in a better state than when I found them.
The Progress: Hrm. As always I have trouble defining this one. I have moved something from a tool to a platform. I also completed a project where I think the code base we ended up with was much more stable than how it started. We introduced a very healthy separation of UI and logic.
As always, I’m open to feedback. Leave some!
1 ResponsesLeave a comment ?
Keep it up, Chad. It's great to read stuff like this from fellow game developers that are always looking at ways to grow and acheive. I'm actually on a similar track for myself this year – I just didn't make it a New Year's Resolution because I think those are lame. :p
On the architect front, a piece of knowledge that hit me like a ton of bricks this year was from Steve McConnell's Code Complete …
"Software's Primary Technical Imperative has to be managing complexity."
I think this is where many aspiring architects fail, and see it as their job to increase complexity on a software project. This is why we've got people like Joel Spolsky complaining about "architecture astronauts".
Anyway, my 2 cents – if you can find a way to add value, functionality, and structure to your code yet do it in a way to manages complexity well then you'll be in great shape.