Thursday, September 29, 2005
How to become a hacker
Nat Friedman has a great post on what it takes to become a decent programmer:
How to become a hacker
I agree with all of his points, especially the paragraph where he mentions that experienced programmers write easy to read code. I can agree with him since, I remember when I was first starting my career that I would try to come up with "elegant" solutions which in hindsight they were not elegant but they were more complex than what was needed to solve the problem. As I my skillset matured, I always tried to come up with a solution that is simple enough to solve the problem. I don't always succeed, but it is worth the effort, especially when you have to revisit your code months later and attempt to fix a bug, and you find a fairly simple to read codebase instead of a over designed mess of curly braces. Make the solution as simple as it needs to be but not more simple than that (or whatever Einstein said).
How to become a hacker
I agree with all of his points, especially the paragraph where he mentions that experienced programmers write easy to read code. I can agree with him since, I remember when I was first starting my career that I would try to come up with "elegant" solutions which in hindsight they were not elegant but they were more complex than what was needed to solve the problem. As I my skillset matured, I always tried to come up with a solution that is simple enough to solve the problem. I don't always succeed, but it is worth the effort, especially when you have to revisit your code months later and attempt to fix a bug, and you find a fairly simple to read codebase instead of a over designed mess of curly braces. Make the solution as simple as it needs to be but not more simple than that (or whatever Einstein said).
