Ever since I stumbled upon a blog entry of Steve Yegger several months ago, I’ve been doing extensive reading. Some people say his posts are too long, but I find myself digging into those entries with eagerness, because I know that I’m gonna learn something from it. Literally, he had indirectly changed my perspective about being a software engineer. Reading those posts had been an enlightening experience as I realize how much I’ve been missing out. Now, after all those reading, I realize that I still know next to nothing, but at least the road is much clearer now, and I no longer have to wander without direction as in 1 year ago.
Anyway, this entry will be about little things that I’ve discovered to increase either my knowledge or my efficiency:
Let’s start with GoogleReader, a tool that I’ve been using extensively to collect and read feeds. It’s a pleasure experience, but this LifeHack link suggestion on using GoogleReader as a database really increased my efficiency several folds. Kinda an irony when I used GoogleReader to collect those entries teaching me how to use GoogleReader *better*.
Digging a bit into the world of professional software enginee, and you will easily find a few prominent people whose blogs are very popular. They all write with a down-to-earth tone and they always have something for me to learn. For example: Jeff Atwood introduces me (besides other things) to ClipX; Steve told me why I should keep writing blog; Martin Fowler explained closure in the easiest way ever; etc… I wish I had known about these people/ this world earlier when I was in college, but I guess it’s never too late to start reading.
Still, there’re lots of obstacles on my way to become a professional programmer. Fortunately, I’ve already know the biggest problem I have. Sadly enough, I can’t seem to overcome it yet, even though I know full well the solution. Specifically, I realize that I’m only doing the #2 of these Three Steps and ignoring the other two almost completely. This is not good, and I plan to start making changes to fix this. Obviously this blog entry is part of the “Reflection” or “Reinforcement” process.
The biggest component, and also the biggest problem for me, is to start a programming project and finish it. I have abandoned most of the side project I started primarily to laziness and lack of passion. But from now on, I hope by writing down the project’s goal, I will have a place to look back and keep going to finish it. So here it goes, I have to finish my first Ruby project on GenerateVietIdiom in 3 months. That’s my goal for now. See you in next entry.
