A passionate dream

I know this will sound a bit aloof, but I have a dream. A dream that software can change the World. Change it to a better place.

For software to be able to do this, we need brilliant and passionate developers. I am not a brilliant developer, but I am good and I am very passionate, which makes me more than halfway there.

How do you become brilliant? I’m sorry to be harsh, but if you are not passionate, you will never become brilliant. You can be good, even better than good, but to really shine you have to be passionate. The problem with passion is (as anyone who has been in love will confirm) that it can devour and engulf you. It will take an inordinate amount of the available time of your life. And you may – like me – feel that you never have enough time, because what you do is simply SO exhilarating.

Besides being passionate you should also be open minded. Never (hardly) think that you have the only right solution to a problem, unless you really have it (you just might). Do not be weary about standing on the shoulders of others. As Knuth said: “Software is hard”. And it is no shame to build your work on top of the work of other brilliant minds.

Building on top of the work of others of course requires that you actually know of the work of these others. Today it has become widely used to blog about your knowledge. And blogs are a valuable tool to find specific technical information. It has become a necessary substitute for the often more than lacking documentation that the various frameworks suffer from.

Reading books can be another very good way to learn. There is so much precious information in books – and at times not so much information as just pages. A lot of computer science theory has been described in books, so if you – for some reason – skipped the computer science classes, you may be able to teach yourself by reading books.

Education and training is an obvious way to learn. I fought my way through university to get a Master’s in Computer Science. To me it was rough, but I am glad that I did it. I try to keep up to date by attending training classes – not as many as I would like – they tend to be expensive. But I like going.

For me there is no doubt that I learn best by doing. No doubt at all. But I also very much like to theorize about a lot of things. I just like thinking about stuff, trying to work it out in my head. Quite often the real solution comes out in a somewhat different looking way.

One of the amazing things with the field of software is that there are so many sub-fields in which you can immerse yourself, which means that more developers than you may think will be able to find an area in which they can be passionate and hopefully grow to become brilliant.

Your way towards brilliance may be long and windy and full of detours. At times tiresome, at times fun and exciting. On the way you will learn a lot about what you definitely should not focus on.

I know for a fact that I should not focus on mathematically intensive areas. I also know that I’m weak in the language areas – especially functional languages, which I, for some reason, always have had difficulties wrapping my brain around. I would like to improve my skills here, though. And may even get around to be doing something serious about it. I did start on “7 Programming Languages in 7 Weeks”, but a bit more than 7 weeks have now gone by. Eventually I will return to it, but I must say that Prolog is hard. At least as difficult for me as functional languages, of which I have spent the most time on F#.

To be honest I am not yet very focused in my efforts, although I do have some areas of particular interest (not necessarily to be confused with actual endeavors): I like databases, especially SQL Server, and I have an interest in development tools – that is: tools that help developers in their efforts to produce the brilliant software the world needs to be changed. I might end up focusing more on this area, but then again:

There is just so much exciting stuff going on in the world of software.

EDIT:

Dr. Dobbs has two articles along the same lines:

What Makes Great Programmers Different?

What Makes Bad Programmers Different?