Inspired by Lore Sjoberg’s “January is the Updatiest Month“, I’ve decided to try updating this blog every day in February. (Because, of course, February is the shortest month of the year, and therefore the easiest month in which to try this.) This would be too much work if every post adhered to the “original content” rules I’ve been applying to this site, so here’s what you can expect for the next month:
- On Fridays, a meaty, original post of the kind you’ve come to know and, well, read
- The other six days of the week, the same sort of random pontificating you might find anywhere else
Advice
As a programmer reading the web, you’ll find no shortage of advice. The thing is, what advice you should listen to depends on what sort of programmer you are. If your code is filled with copy-and-pasted sections, you should work on abstraction. If your code runs slowly, you should learn a little about complexity theory. If you’re an architecture astronaut, you need to put down the GoF book and learn about YAGNI.
Contrariwise, if you’re guilty of premature optimization, reading advice about performance tuning isn’t going to help. So, when reading advice on the Internet, keep in mind what your strengths and weaknesses are, and remember that what might be good advice for someone else might not be good for you. Too much of a good thing, and all that.
Personally, I tend to over-think things. The advice I find most useful is to always ask myself: “What is the simplest, stupidest thing I could do right now to solve my problem?”. That keeps the ball moving forward, and, on those occasions when something more complex turns out to be needed, it’s always easier to design it once the real-world requirements have become clear through experiment and experience.
