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Becoming a Better Programmer

Here’s the interview with the Java Champion Heinz Kabutz by sun.

In his closing thoughts, that guy gave some suggestions for how to be a good programmer. I found that the continuous learning again is a very important thing. As Kabutz mentioned, keep learning and experiment in technical, we have to sacrifice our personal time. It push me thinking that recently I spent all my personal time in playing WOW since the expansion TBC launched in China. And now my most interested thing had been done, the druid’s epic flight form. I have to say flight is the most wonderful thing in WOW.

So what’s the next step?

Seems I always have many learning plans in hands but don’t have relevant action plans!

  1. learning PHP. motivation is I want to learn another language.
  2. reading books.
    • <the extreme programming explained, by Kent Beck>,
    • <the Pragmatic Progammer, Andrew Hunt & David Thomas>
  3. learning algorithm. but I still wonder whether learning algorithm will contribute to my working as a information system development.Definitely hope people can give some recommendations!
  4. JUnit testing, EJB, WebWork, Freemarker, selenium, etc… those

things are used in the project I’m working on. Hope I will got more opportunities to experiment with JUnit, Selenium and EJB.

Kabutz: Programmers need to be careful that their brains don’t turn to stone. You may specialize in one field and find that, when the technology changes, you end up on the street. Because your brain is your single biggest asset, you need to continually feed it new information and ideas.

To really learn, you need to choose the technology that you want to experiment in and take the time to study and read, which will require sacrificing your personal time. If you follow this advice, you’ll grow more valuable over time and won’t become a computer dinosaur.

I’ve taught many courses to contented programmers, ranging from Y2K consultants to COBOL programmers, who have stuck their head in the sand for so long that it’s downright impossible for them to adapt to new paradigms and languages.

If you are currently a Java programmer, you owe it to yourself to experiment in other technologies. Try out Squeak, JRuby, and other languages. Install and use a different IDE. Never stop learning. The moment you stop, you can lose the wave, and it will require a lot of paddling to catch up with it again.