I’m generally not a fan of new year’s resolutions, but I think that it’s important to make time specifically for setting some short-term and long-term goals. I’d like to share some of my more major goals for 2009.
I’m hoping that posting them here might keep me accountable. You can pummel me on twitter if I’m not keeping good on my promises if you like.
Spaghetti code is a term we seem to hear a lot in the programming realm, but I’m not convinced that we all really know how to recognize it we’re poring through our code.
This last week I had the pleasure of helping someone with a web development problem on a certain new developer focused site. While I was able to solve this person’s issue for now, what I saw saddened and angered me. The code that this person posted was THE essence of spaghetti code.
First I want to say that I do not mean to call out the poster, I have total faith that he is not the original author. In general, it does not matter WHO wrote the code, a good programmer will take responsibility and fix this broken window unpinned grenade without a finger of blame.
A couple months ago I was at my Alma Mater Adams State College to talk about what I would have wanted to know if I was a student. I’ve been out of college for 3 years now, and held 3 VERY different programming jobs since graduating with my Bachelor’s Degree. I am hoping to shed some light on what I have learned about the "real world" and clear up some misconceptions.
I just want to give you enough information about where I’m coming from here. Obviously, your experiences will be different but I think there are several things common to almost all workplaces and that is what this post will focus on.
I have done data-oriented programming, back-end programming, and web programming for a couple small companies and one quite large company. All of these positions were around Northern Colorado/Wyoming so we’re not exactly in Silicon Valley. If you really care about the details you can check out my LinkedIn page.