Cenny Wenner

I haven’t done any work to achieve this; it is part of my personality. I only live to do well in life and I generally see negative emotions as hindering. Learn from the past but don’t feel bad about anything. Look ahead and try to do the best you can given the circumstances.

Once you are experienced as a programmer, new languages come almost automatically. Just read a strip of code and spend a few hours reading through the documentation and you will be ready to rock! Albeit not to master.

Ruby is my favorite prototyping language.

My tip: 1. choose a language and learn to program, 2. read the pragmatic programming book.

My take: As a programmer, it can be easy to think that our current abilities are near perfect in the areas we excel at. This is hardly ever the case. There’s always more to learn and in most areas, there are even people just as good or better than you. Be humble and learn from others. Strive to do even better. It’s not about how good you are but what you do. Do not disregard other things simply because you do not do them or other arbitrary feelings. Or else, it would be like resenting Linux without knowing the first thing about it.

I’ve been programming since I was a kid and I think I have attained fairly high levels now, judging by my ability to answer questions. How I went about becoming a good programmer was, I believe, a highly inefficient path. I’ve mostly just been learning by doing things that seemed fun. The downside with this was that there was a lot of repetition, plenty of life-altering knowledge not at my disposal, and overall a general lack of significant improvement.

• Read through the language documentation to get an idea what there is. You do not need to memorize everything but glance over the material every now and then and look up the things you forgot.
• If you are new, get a lot of practice, ask questions, and look at code written by more experienced programmers.
• Learn big-oh notation, and basic algorithms and data structures.
• Work on projects with other good programmers.
• Improve your exposure to techniques, knowledge, tricks, problems etc.
• Document your work/write comments in your code.
• Take courses or read books.
• Try to find libraries or reuse code for parts that offer little in terms of learning. Learning to use the library or the code is often more useful and you can always return to implement your own functions later on (but once you know a library, you will usually appreciate it).
• Join one or more forums and participate.
• Learn programming techniques and pattern.
• Avoid excessive chatting and various forms of procrastination.
• Do not think too little or too much. It is usually better to work iteratively than to aim for something perfect the first time.
• Refactorize before adding more features.
• Get others to comment on your algorithms or code.
• Be humble but industrious. Welcome new information with open arms.
• Actively choose your projects and tasks to maximize learning. Avoid repetition without significant improvement.
• Take pride in and have fun learning.