Career – Page 2 – robhorton.net

Eager Beaver

March 15, 2017June 6, 2012 by Rob Horton

I wanted to drop in today and tell you a quick story about (long ago) my being the eager, new guy in IT and how a manager handled my extreme over-zealousness. Perhaps someone out there can draw some inspiration from it, whether you’re the new guy or the manager/team-lead with a new guy. So as … Read more Eager Beaver

The Simpleton Pattern

March 15, 2017December 5, 2011 by Rob Horton

No, you read that correctly. Simpleton, not Singleton is the subject of choice today. Recently a fellow developer was looking over some code that I had written.

He commented on it by saying, “Rob I just love looking at your code. It’s simple, easy to read, well-commented, and just makes sense”.

I replied, “Well that’s likely because I’m a simpleton”.

So jokes ensued with my friend asking, “Is that the design pattern you follow?”. I thought, well yeah actually I guess it is and thus was born the idea for this blog post.

The Pessimistic Programmer

March 15, 2017November 28, 2011 by Rob Horton

If you’re a programmer of any kind and have done it for any length of time at all; particularly as your profession, not just a hobby, you know this one rule:

Good programmers expect things to go bad.

One of our prime directives as lord or lady of the bits and bytes is to predict what can go wrong and prevent it. Or at the worst case, handle it gracefully.

Being a developer isn’t exactly all baby giggles and sunbeams so a healthy amount of pessimism is certainly warranted.

You never know what you know until you share it

March 15, 2017November 8, 2011 by Rob Horton

A lot of highly analytical folks I’ve met over the years have not been the best communicators. Heck I was first mentored by a Unix admin. He was not known for the leading you by the hand approach. Ok, that’s not fair. He’d lead you once but you’d better, by cracky, take copious notes and never have to ask about that thing again or suffer The Look.

Anybody with me on that one? Been there?

Software developer from good to great

March 15, 2017November 5, 2011 by Rob Horton

I’ve been in IT for 15 years now. For most of that time, I’ve been programming, at least on some level, even if it was “only” batch files. I’ve worked as an employee, a contractor and an independent consultant. For companies both large, medium and small, I’ve written code, built computers, networked them, trained users and written documentation for it all. I’ve done this on small and large teams as well as having been “the guy”. So I’ve been around … and there was five sentences about me.

Enough of that though, this is about you.

Ask .. “What Changed?

March 15, 2017November 4, 2011 by Rob Horton

Ok this may sound simple. It may seem like a “duh” moment. However, we’ve all been there, right? The pressure is freakin’ ON .. and .. either your an employee or heaven-forbid, an even more expendable consultant, but the world is on fire, mountains are crumbling and folks ranting. The guy or gal who last worked on this project is either dead and buried or “called in sick” and you’re lost. Everyone is looking at you saying, “Well it worked when I went home last night! How soon can we get this {insert name of the unbelievably important application here} back up and running??!?!”

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