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  Are older people better programmers?

Peter Knego states something interesting: “It's official: developers get better with age. And scarcer.”. He uses reputation and other metrics from StackOverflow to corroborate his point. His summary is: Number of coders drops significantly with age. Top developer numbers, at age 27, drop by half every 6-7 years.Developers in their 40s answer roughly twice as much and ask half the questions compared to colleagues in their 20s. It seems younger generation learns and older generatio...

   Programming,Age,Experience,Skill,Advanta     2011-07-28 09:02:23

  Could coding be the next mass profession?

Like farming was in the 17th century, factory work during the industrial revolution, construction during the Great Depression, and manufacturing after World War II. Better, because writing code is a creative act which can be done with or without a traditional (antiquated?) office-based job, and can create enormous personal and economic value. Most young people start in jobs that don’t have much of a future. Most don’t get higher education – only a third get a...

   Coder,Learning,Training,Profession     2012-01-05 08:02:50

  Advice From An Old Programmer

You've finished this book and have decided to continue with programming. Maybe it will be a career for you, or maybe it will be a hobby. You'll need some advice to make sure you continue on the right path, and get the most enjoyment out of your newly chosen activity. I've been programming for a very long time. So long that it's incredibly boring to me. At the time that I wrote this book, I knew about 20 programming languages and could learn new ones in about a day to a week depending on how w...

   Advice,Programming,Python,Old programmer     2012-03-08 13:51:11

  What Level Programmer Are You?

Everybody's talking about how programming is the skill that we all are going to need. [Except those folks who might feel that most programming could be turned into wizard-like tools. Insert long discussion about Strong AI.] But what's a programmer? Is the guy who set up his own Apache Web Server a programmer? How about the guy who created a complex Excel spreadsheet? The guy who made his own RPG level? Minecraft players? When we say "Everybody is going to have to know programming" what, e...

   Programmer,Skill,Level,Criteria     2012-02-08 10:07:41

  Forgotten TODOs: ideas for contributing to open-source projects

I often talk to students that want to contribute to open-source projects, but just don't have an idea what to work on. Here's a tip if you're in a similar situation (e.g. you want to apply for GSOC) : 1 git clone repository_url_of_some_open_source_project target_directory 2 grep -RIn TODO target_directory/* So, find the URL of the repository project you want to contribute to, checkout the repository using git/mercurial/svn and then find all the TODOs in the source code using grep. The -RI...

   Open source,constribution,TODO,participation     2012-03-03 22:30:28

  Selling Yourself: Why? and How!

I know many good developers who are under the impression that they either don’t have to sell themselves, or selling themselves is wrong, but is that really true?First let me clarify by defining what I mean by “selling yourself”. I don’t mean “selling out”, I mean marketing yourself, what you’re doing and what your skills are. Especially to your organization.I don’t need to sell myself, my code speaks for itself.Really? Do you think your pristin...

   Sell,Developer,Skill,Show,Resume,CV     2011-08-10 03:19:34

  Why I Won’t Hire You

I will be very honest with you in this post. Most interview articles only show obvious mistakes, as if most people don’t know showing up late is bad form. I will tell you the things I didn’t really know about until I was the one interviewing, and interviewing for a variety of positions and person-types. No interview prep article ever prepared me in the right way for how interviewers really think. That is what I will be sharing with you today. When you first walk in...

   Career,Hire,Preparartion,CV,Resume     2012-01-11 04:38:19

  A Better Way to Learn How to Program

Learning how to program can be a nightmare. An aspiring coder has to jump through many unpleasant hoops and mysterious error messages just to get "Hello, World!" printed on the screen. Then, she's left wondering, "OK, now what? How do I actually build something?"As game developers seeing someone struggle through this, we should be screaming, “NOOOOO!” The whole thing reeks of bad game design: a lot of work with no reward, unclear failure cases, advanced features pushed on new players...

   Programming pattern,Game design,Derivati     2011-09-19 13:51:17

  Stuff Everyone Should Do (part 2): Coding Standards

Another thing that we did at Google that I thought was surprisingly effective and useful was strict coding standards. Before my time at Google, I was sure that coding standards were pointless. I had absolutely no doubt that they were the kind of thing that petty bureaucrats waste time writing and then use to hassle people who are actually productive. I was seriously wrong. At Google, I could look at any piece of code, anywhere in Google's codebase, and I could read it. The fact that I wa...

   Programming,Code standards,Rules,Stringe     2011-08-15 07:33:02

  ARE YOU LIKE ME? OR DO YOU HAVE DISCIPLINE?

If you are anything like me, you've started more things than you have finished. We're innately curious about the things around us and inspired when we come across people who have mastered their trade. We see people create cool and beautiful things and think, "Man, that looks easy, if I put in a little time I can do that in no time." What follows is a few days or weeks of focused and dedicated learning. During this time we make some progress, but not much. In fact, the progress that we do ma...

   Work,Learning,Effort,Detail,Complexity     2011-10-25 10:27:28

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