getting better

The Simpleton Pattern

by

Simpleton UniversityNo, 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.

Read moreThe Simpleton Pattern

The Pessimistic Programmer

by

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.

Read moreThe Pessimistic Programmer

Software developer from good to great

by

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.

Read moreSoftware developer from good to great