How to be a better programmer – the redux

"Software development productivity would skyrocket if the least effective 30% were fired tomorrow" — Neal Ford

It was in the December of 2005 that I first wrote about how to be a better programmer. At that time I was into my fifth year as a programmer, and though I wanted to write what I am writing today, I decided to narrow down my scope to non-technical issues. I wrote about code readability and code maintainability that day. As important as these issues were (are), I guess there is a larger issue that must be addressed — the technical skill set of the programmers. Then I wrote about (nay, linked to) the fatherly advice to new programmers by Chuck Jazdzewski.

I am now into my eighth year as a programmer, and unfortunately, the rate at which the industry has understood the importance of the quality of code or for that matter about issues like code readability or code maintainability is pretty dismal. This might be justified by arguments like "in service industry, deadline is more important". But people just don’t understand that in the rush to push the software out of the door, the quality of the code suffers, which directly affects how quickly you can ship the second or later versions. To make matters worse, people who can really understand the code at a deep level, and who are really interested in programming, is a minority, and I guess it would remain that way for the foreseeable future.

The triggering point for writing that piece three years ago was a mail from my counterpart in UK, who wanted the team to ensure that they are putting comments properly, and (though he didn’t explicitly mention the words, he provided an example that pointed to writing) comment at the level of intent. I am not sure how many people read that post (considering that I find it difficult to tell people that I blog; except to my close friends and family), but at least from that day, I made it a point to tell my team members the importance of writing code the proper way, and when required, show them how it is done. The triggering point for writing this has been yet another series of events. I thought it was time I write this down, so that a) I can refer back when I want to, and, b) pass this on to anyone to whom I feel like preaching in the future :).

The first and the most important aspect to become a better programmer is to have something called interest or involvement. Half the crowd I meet are programming just for the sake of doing some work. Programming, unfortunately, is not similar to doing most other jobs where you learn and master something once, and you can carry on without learning anything new for quite some time, and in some cases, for years altogether (or for life). Careers that spring to my mind include Government Service, Accountancy, Banking, Teaching, and certain professions like certain streams of Engineering and Law. Of course, in each of these cases, there is something new to learn every year (or every few years), but compared to the frequency at which things change, and the effort involved to keep ahead of the curve, they do appear trivial and manageable. [I know this is going to be a controversial perspective, but being a Mechanical Engineer and being someone who has a passion for teaching, and who dreamt about doing M.Tech and becoming a professor, I hope I know what I am talking about here]. Anyways, I don’t mean any kind of disrespect to any of the professions. I am just pointing out the fact that you don’t have to explicitly sit down and read a few books on your subject to remain good in many a profession out there.

In programming, what you know today is of little or no use two years down the line. I remember reading way back in 2002 about an interesting incident narrated by David Chappell in his book, Understanding Dotnet, First Edition. Chappell was taking a session on DCOM (if I remember right) at Moscow, when someone in the crowd got up and asked him why is that Microsoft is changing the technology every few years, and how he is finding it difficult to cope up with that. Chappell told him, as a matter of fact, that if he finds the change difficult to cope with, he is perhaps in the wrong profession. I wish we could make more programmers understand this simple fact – the fact that in this profession one can’t stop learning. In fact the number of programmers who have read any of the top 25 books on programming or software would be less than 10%. This might be an example of the Sturgeon’s Law (that 90% of people will never care and 10% of people would cover up for them in most professions).

To make matters interesting the IT industry doesn’t quite teach them that programming is important, and I live in a society, where if I tell them I am programming in the eighth year of my career, people think I am a (lowly) programmer still, perhaps because I don’t have what it takes to be a manager or a team leader who mostly takes care of team management related activities. The trend is to learn programming at the level of writing if..else, for..do and yes, playing around a bit with something called objects (without really understanding what they actually are and what they are meant to be), and do programming for four or five years, all the while remaining at that basic level, never bothering to go out of the way to improve oneself, and jump on the management related bandwagon at the first possible instance.

This is where some of the most successful companies around the world stand out, and it is not a coincidence that most of them are run by people who were great programmers, and who still love and do programming. The best example would be Google and I can never forget the beauty of this story and what it tells you about the company (or the story of how Sergey Brin wrote an application to test Android, and the application was about using the accelerometer in the device to determine the time an Android phone was in the air when it is tossed up; the point is there are very talented programmers at the top who are really interested in coding in spite of being so successful), though there are quite a few others like Microsoft, Martin Fowler’s ThoughtWorks, Joel Spolsky’s Fog Creek Software, and Steve McConnell’s Construx Software. Construx has published the Construx Professional Ladder for its employees who aspire to move up the corporate heirarchy (the ladder), and the best part is that it ensures that those who grow to be the Team Leads or Managers, are people who are widely read, and who have understood the nuances of programming, and can still solve the problem, if the programmers are not able to solve it.

To put matters in perspective, check this recommended reading list for a Level 10 programmer at Construx. Please note that Level 10 is not the Architect or the Technical Leader. It is the programmer with some experience ("College graduates will generally start at Level 9. Experienced developers may start at Level 10"). That might appear a bit over the top by your or my standards, but that tells you what separates the great companies from the merely good or average ones — it is the quality of the people. I think it was Kent Beck (in Extreme Programming Explained, Second Edition) who said something along the lines of "a more talented team will almost always beat an average or less talented team, no matter how disciplined and process oriented the average or less talented team is, and you can’t do much about it". A cruel (for me, at least) example of that in the wild is watching the Germans end up as the runners up (or loosing semi finalists) at the World Cups in 2002 and 2006, and in Euro 2008. With a bit more talent (or a bit more botch-up by the opposition, they could have won any of those events).

To be a good programmer, one needs to have a good grasp of the fundamentals of programming (and there is no better language to learn this than C followed by C++, though that unfortunately is out of fashion these days). This must be followed by learning a modern mainstream programming language like Java or C#. But if you start with either Java or C#, you would miss quite a bit on really understanding pointers and objects at a fundamental level. This must be followed by learning, reading and eventually mastering OOAD, UML, Refactoring and Design Patterns. It will be really useful if one can find the time to explore and learn dynamic programming languages like Python or Ruby, as they bring a different perspective to programming, thus enriching one’s knowledge and understanding.

Yet another mandatory aspect going forward would be exposure to Agile methodologies (don’t think I am crazy, but there is a big crowd out there that doesn’t understand what is agile). Even if the team is not 100% agile, there is a lot to learn from the agile community. If anyone has any doubt about agile, the only thing to keep in mind that the top guys of the Design Patterns movement are also the people who were the forefathers of the Agile movement — people like Ward Cunningham, Kent Beck, Eric Gamma, Martin Fowler, Alistair Cockburn, Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt to name a few that I can recollect over the top of my head. Since each of them are titans in their own rights, there must be something in it for us to learn.

The best part of this learning, IMHO, is that it leaves one in such a strong position to negotiate most of the stuff that comes one’s way – a bit like how Dravid could easily and with grace negotiate the unplayable deliveries from the Donalds, McGraths, Pollocks and Waqars of this world, in his pomp, in spite of not having grown up facing them or anyone of their calibre. This was made possible by the fact that in spite of not being a genius like Sachin or Lara, he kept on working on his game, improved every day as a batsman by putting in the effort, and thinking about his game. [I wrote this without being aware of the match saving 100 he made at Mohali].

The best resource that I am aware of to learn the basics of the aforementioned stuff , that I am aware of, is listed below. These books helped me immensely in my development as a professional, and I hope at least some of you can and will find them useful.

Programming Language basics:

The C Programming Language by Kerninghan and Ritchie (the K&R book)

The C++ Programming Language by Bjarne Stroustrup (it is a tome, but worth every minute of your time)

The Java Programming Language by James Gosling et al (a beautiful book)

Thinking in Java by Bruce Eckel (or the unpublished C# version freely available on the net)

Design basics:

UML Distilled by Martin Fowler

Refactoring by Martin Fowler

Applying UML and Patterns by Craig Larman

Object Oriented Analysis by Peter Coad and Edward Yourdon

Object Oriented Design by Peter Coad and Edward Yourdon

Design Patterns:

Design Patterns by Gamma et al. [the GoF book; I am yet to read this as it is in C++]

Head First Design Patterns by Eric Freeman, Elisabeth Freeman, Kathy Sierra, Bert Bates

Design Patterns Explained by Alan Shalloway and James R. Trott

Taking the skills to the next level:

Code Complete by Steve McConnell, Second Edition

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas

Software Craftsmanship: The New Imperative by Pete McBreen

Books on Agile:

Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change, Second Edition, by Kent Beck (there are two editions and it is fascinating to read both back to back :)

Agile Software Development: The Cooperative Game, Second Edition, by Alistair Cockburn

There are no shortcuts to mastery in any field, and software is no different. Unless you read some of the above books, you wouldn’t even know what all you miss (in terms of knowledge and skills missing from your toolbox). Again, this must be supplemented by some real hard work at the PC — programming, trying to implement and refine what one has learned. As the old saying goes, there is no substitute for practice.

Next, since we live in a society, we do need to work upon our soft skills, and people interaction skills come right at the top of the skills to acquire. One of the best resource to learn from this would be How to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie, as attested by both Jeff Atwood and Steve McConnell. In fact, if I remember right, McConnell writes something along the lines of "it must be made a mandatory book for every member of the team". How true!

Internet is such a free and ever available source to learn new stuff. In addition to reading MSDN or other technology oriented sites, read the great programmer’s blogs and learn from the masters. Let Google Reader be your best friend in this attempt. It has been for me, for three years now.

Update [14-Jan-09]: cleaned up the essay a bit and included a few more links in the story.

Kerala Pigrimage trip 2007

It is after a while that I felt like posting something and upload some pix. We just returned back from a memorable pilgrimage trip to Kerala over the weekend.

Myself, Preethi, my parents and her parents (who were on a visit to Chennai) left for Palghat on Thu, 04-Sep-07 and came back to Chennai on Mon, 08-Sep-07. It was primarily a pilgrimage and so we got to visit lots of temples in Palghat, visited Kalpathy gramam (where I stayed during my Engineering days), Malampuzha Dam and my alma mater, NSS College of Engineering, Palghat.

We left Palghat on Sat morning to Kadampuzha Bhagavathi Temple, a fantastic temple in the Malappuram district, 3 km off Vettichira in the NH 17 connecting Thrissur and Kozhikode (and beyond probably).

After spending 4 hours at Kadampuzha, we left for Guruvayoor, and visited the famous Anathavalam in Guruvayoor on the way. We had great darshan on Sat evening and again had darshan on Sunday. We also visited the other temples like Mammiyoor, Parthasarathy, Balaji and Sai Baba.

Post lunch, we packed again and were on the way back to Palghat. Sun night we boarded the train to travel back to Chennai.

The worst part of the trip was the fact that almost all the roads in the parts of Kerala I visited were in pretty bad shape, something most people from Kerala are aware of. I heard that the last roads in Palghat were worked upon was about 8 years back, while I was there! Amazing, isn’t it? It happens only in Kerala.

Earlier, during August, we had taken a week off from work to spend some quality time at Preethi’s home in Bombay. That too was quite a memorable trip and as a bonus got to read quite a bit during this trip. I got to finish the Edition 1 and 2 of “XP Explained: Embrace Change” by Kent Beck. I also got to visit some of Preethi’s relatives and family friends and her Sify office near the Airport. We also met my good friend Biju during our stay. I also started watching some great action from the English Premiere League.

We spend the Independence Day at Pune with my cousin Reghu. He took us to the Tirupati Balaji temple that morning. It is another great temple in the middle of (almost) nowhere, about 2 hrs journey from Pune, lying between the Satara Highway on one side and the Bangalore Highway on the other. Climate was just pristine during this period, as the South West monsoon was just winding up its act.

I have uploaded some of the pix taken at various points of time in 2007. Click the links below to watch them:

Palghat trip, 2007

Bombay trip, 2007

Chennai photos, 2007

This time I have decided to try out Picasa Web Albums instead of Flickr (Reghu, hope you are happy now) for a change, and let us see whether I like this better enough to make the switch.

What I don’t like about Picasa is that it offers only 1 GB of free storage. There is no such storage limit in Flickr, though you can only upload 20 or 40 MB of pix per month and one gets to display only the 200 most recent photos on the Flickr page. Of course, all the old photos are still available for viewing provided you know which tag to use to view them.

I would love to post my musings on software and life and click and upload pix more regularly going forward. Let us see how far I succeed. I don’t have a camera with me and so that is a serious limitation on trips like these. I have lots of pix awaiting upload from 2006 and let us see whether I get around to upload them as well.

Thanks for reading so far. Take care and be well. And please start using RSS for your own sake if you haven’t started yet. You might get lost in its magic just as I have!

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Geotagged my Flickr photos!

The best online photo sharing site out there, Flickr, announced a couple of days’ back that they are introducing geotagging for our photos. It has received excellent reviews from all and sundry, including the competitors, as reported by TechCruch. So, after reading that, I thought I would also indulge in some fun. And the end result is that most of my photos are now geotagged, and are available here. It is by no means perfect (the map for India is nowhere near as good as for the US or Europe), but something is better than nothing. Have fun exploring my geotagged photos.

As an aside, tell me Apple, doesn’t Flickr rock compared to anything else, including Google Picasa Web Albums? The answer is simple, it does! But I do hope that Google would get their act together at the earliest and provide an option to upload all the photos from Flickr to Picasa Web Albums ;). Because I think I have been Googleized beyond reprieve!!

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Are you NOT using RSS yet?

“Let the information come to you instead of [you] actively searching for it.” — From the introduction to RSS by LoadAverageZero.

I have been thinking of posting about the greatness of RSS [acronym for Really Simple Syndication] and how it has completely changed the way I browse for about 4 months now (believe me!). I just couldn’t motivate myself to write about this thing which might or might not be useful to everyone.

But today I got the bit of inspiration I was looking for. One of my friends who is extremely busy these days, send in this by mail today:

“…are u updating the blog? Tell me if i would get a mail after u update…”

This triggered off a train of actions that ultimately resulted in this post.

OK, having got the why this post part out of the way, let me get down to explaining what this fuss is all about. RSS is a three letter acronym that stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary or RDF Site Summary. Whatever, it is, all we should be worrying about is how to harness the power of RSS.

But, at least some of you might be interested in knowing a bit more about RSS. So please this post by Dan Read of DeveloperDotStar first, where he touches upon the beauty of RSS and how useful it is, and after that links you to this simple intro to RSS posted at LoadAverageZero. However, there is a much simpler and more layman-ish intro available at the BBC Feedfactory site.

So go, first read Dan’s post followed by either of those two intros. Till then I will wait, I promise.

Ok, now that you know how simple RSS is — it is just an XML file — you need to know how to harness its power.

There are special (and simple) software available that can make sense of all this XML stuff being spewed out by the various sources, including BBC and DeveloperDotStar. For this, we use something called as a News-Aggregator or a News-Reader, of which there are two kinds — desktop and web-based.

The basic tasks of a feed reader will be to:

• Keep track of the news and blogs you are interested in
• Highlight the entries you are yet to read
• Have a way to link to the original post for each entry

The desktop reader is a simple application that you can download and install in your PC, that will keep track of all the emerging news and blog posts. There are also special plug-ins available that can be added onto either Outlook or Firefox (Sage) to do the same thing. This avoids the use of an external application (other than your browser and/or mail client). Another cute way of achieving the same is to use the mail client Mozilla Thunderbird that has a built-in news aggregator.

The disadvantage of this approach would be that if you are using more than one PC to browse the web (say one at work and one back home as I am doing), then these two versions will not be in sync. So you won’t be able to easily find out what all feeds you have already read.

This is where the web-based version comes to our rescue. Here you login to a site — just like logging into your mail account — that keeps track of your feeds for you. The best among the desktop version would be Bloglines, Rojo and Google Reader. I am using Google Reader for about 5 months now though it is still in Beta.

There is a another class of web based aggregators emerging now, that offers much more than just aggregating your feeds. These are popularly known as a web-desktop. The best among the lot would be Netvibes, closely followed by Google Personalised Home, PageFlakes, My Yahoo, MSN Live and countless others.

But of this lot, I prefer Netvibes, which I am using for about 4 months now. I use it to track the feeds, but prefer doing the actual reading in Google Reader.

So, in a nutshell, RSS is all about letting the info come to you rather than actively searching for it, as mentioned in that LoadAverageZero intro.

I really would appreciate if you can comment about the usability of this article. That will help me in improving my posts in future. Thanks for reading thus far.

Postscript: Yes, I am going to mail my friend that I have posted an entry. But I just hope this will be the last time I will be doing so :).