Programming insights to Storytelling, it's all here.
Every once in a while I find a few tricks that make me more productive. I post them right here on the blog. Productivity is relative however. What is a productive day? Sometimes I go to work and spend the whole day working without checking Youtube, reading blogs or news, and I feel productive. But when I get home, I am tired and I sleep until the next day. Then I feel like I have not been productive toward something else.
When I say I have spent a long time workingplaying with code it might seem like a joke for those who have been programmers for 10 or 20 years. My experience is far less but nevertheless it is a long time. The compiler, which could be gcc, the IDE, the browser, or anything that understands code, is the programmer's best friend. You tell it what you want and it does it. Usually followed by satisfaction.
There are those moments where I feel the need to share. Sometimes it is when I do something small like fix a bug, or even smaller like when I first really understood what the value of π (PI) actually refers to. It feels great and when it happens I want to share. Unfortunately when I talk about it, the conversion from thoughts in my head to spoken words is a lossy transaction. I end up being a complete bore.
A while ago, I was trying to find a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests made on my pages. To make development easier, each section of the CSS is in a different file; this way, I know exactly where everything is located when I want to make changes. However, making 10 to 15 request just to get the CSS is too much overhead. It could be much better if I could combine them all into one.
It's easy to be impressed by a programming language and start bashing others. Beginners look for those "hello word" tutorials and seasoned developers read blog post or documentations to learn more about them. The choice may start by looking for a language that offers to do the most with less code. Sometimes benchmarks are used to determine which is the fastest, but it is rarely what makes you take a decision. The winner is almost always the language that looks more like the ones you are familiar with.
Can't let them fire me. These are the words uttered every time an employee doesn't get along with an employer. I've seen it happen many times and the employee always thinks that he has the upper hand.
There is something about giving an ETA that I hate. As programmer I want to say I never ever gave an ETA that was remotely accurate. In my experience an ETA is the nice way for a manager to give you a dead line. Countless times I have pulled numbers out of thin air only for the manager to suggest a different number (Well if you had a date in mind why do you waste my time). To me ETA is acronym to Estimated Time of Arrival. If we are talking, I have already arrived, don't ask me about it.
This post is here for the sole purpose that writing is hard. It takes a while to write. Writing in haste produce long incoherent sentences that, if luck strikes, may produce a beautiful piece that communicates an idea.
If you talk to any programmer they will tell you how a particular tool, programming language, OS, sucks and that X is the best. if you talk to any programmer they will tell you how the code they currently work on sucks, if they had written it in Node.js it would have been much better.
The process to get a job today is straight forward. You start by browsing job boards and look for the perfect fit. You find a nice company that is looking for those exact skills you have and some trivial ones no one has (5 years experience with chipmunk.js). You write a cover letter catered to this specific company, you attach your resume and send it. Hopefully your application ends up in the hand of someone in human resources and you get a call.
