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).

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