Skip to main content

Programming lessons

One of my friends shared this in Google Reader - most of them are items I already knew about and been rehashed in several programming articles/books. I do feel like #5 needs to be repeated over and over again for me.

"You are not the best at programming. Live with it. - I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them."

One must never forget the fact that we are all "standing on the shoulders of giants". Well, Isaac Newton put it that way but you get my point. Everything we accomplish in our field today is because a few pioneers in the past did the ground-work to get us here. I understand that, but tend to stumble at the "Live with it" part. I do realize that I have to keep learning and keep improving myself, but its hard for me to calmly accept that someone is much better than me. I don't mean that I don't acknowledge my weaknesses, its more along the lines of me obsessing about - "what can I do to be at least as good as X". I start over-analyzing and set unrealistic goals for myself which I don't meet.

The point is - its not about beating someone at something specific, its about what new skill/tool I learn over time and how it makes me more efficient at anything else I do in the future.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

When two choices are enough

I came across the  power of two choices   theorem recently, it was referenced in a tech talk about schedulers. The central premise of the power of two choices is simple. Yet it is striking in its effectiveness in making decisions about routing requests. The following is my restatement of the premise: You have n options, and a score or rank associated with each of them. You also have an incoming queue of decisions to make about which option to pick. At each decision point, if you pick two options from the n at random, and then use the score to pick the best among those two, you will get exponentially better results (in terms of distributing load), than choosing a random option.  Going from best of two, to best of 3 or 4 or more, only improves the results by a constant factor.  Using power of two choices really starts to pay off when n is very large and examining all n options becomes prohibitively expensive.  The paper applies this to load balancing, whe...
Post a Comment
Read more

What are your future plans? Why are you *still* a developer?

If I had a nickel for every time someone has asked me that question I'd have enough change for a year? Inspired by my friend's post here , I thought I'd write about how I ended up doing what I do now. Then I thought about it some more and decided to write about something else. Is it important to know where you are going in life? If you aren't moving forward in your career does it mean that you are doing something wrong? What does "moving up the ladder" even mean? I am going to attempt to answer these questions for myself. Its almost 5 years since I began my professional career. It has been great so far, lots of ups some downs as well. However, once in a while when I get the title question it still throws me off. It is usually my parents or well meaning relatives, sometimes friends that ask this. I have nothing much to say to them except "I enjoy what I am doing right now, haven't really thought about the future". But the truth is - I have thou...
4 comments
Read more

My perspective of women in CS

For almost all of my professional life I have been very passionate about this topic. I am on the Anita Borg Institute  mailing list. I read various posts addressing this where they talk about why girls need more encouragement to get involved in CS from an early age and how gender stereotyping in schools is hurting their chances. Programs like  http://www.girlstart.org/  conduct camps and special events to encourage girls in STEM subjects, that I enthusiastically support. I got extremely worked up over this post ( http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/28/women-in-tech-stop-blaming-me/ ). Two years later it still makes me angry. There's no disputing the fact is that there are relatively very few women in this field, both entrepreneurs and working in the industry. There's also no disputing a facts like the last ten years of ACM programming champion teams are all men. Sure, there are stellar examples like Marissa Mayer, but what about all these women here who want to bre...
Post a Comment
Read more