John Coder

"You read too much," I'm told by a well respected peer (whom I assume was only kidding...).  Alas—It's true.  My cup runneth over with things to read.  I can't help it if I find things like Development Abstraction,screwing (yeah, you have to click on it for it make sense...), and building monsters in the garage immensely interesting.  Make no mistake about it, reading is good for you.

The Internet leaves us with no shortage of things to read.  A lot of it is crap, but there are some good things out there.  What I find daunting, and often dangerous, is that one article leads to another.  I keep turning the pages of the newspaper, but it never ends.  It's dangerous because it can lead to information overload, but we all know our limits.  I learn from the things I read, but I think there's something much bigger going on.

I'm getting better at basic things we've learned to ignore since grade school—reading and writing.  Ultimately, it's practice and repetition that makes us better at these activities.  People who read are often better at writing.  Furthermore, people who write and write often improve their writing skills.  It's my hope that this somehow reflects in my day to day ability to communicate in the work place, and who knows, maybe even improve the quality of my code.  The not-so-secret path to getting better at writing code is to write code.

Blogs are some of the best ways to get your opinions and information out into the world.  I'm not the first to discover this by any means, but it's a way that I've become greedy (for all of the FREE knowledge people are willing to share, as long as you're willing to read).  I subscribe to many RSS feeds, and often try to read anything that pops up in it.  Take the best and leave the worst.

*Disclaimer:  While reading blogs, you may find yourself saying:

"I once read a blog post about ... [ blah, blah, <nerdy topic>, blah blah ]" – me

So how can I write a blog post, totally self motivated, and then make a jab at my own character flaws?  Well, you're just going to have to figure that one out for yourself. 

Welcome to my blog!  You maybe wondering "Why a blog?"  The answer is simple.  Engagement.  No, not marital engagement--more like active engagement.  On my own time, I try to stay on top of what is "up and coming" in the developer community.  When I find something interesting, it might find its way to this blog.  It could be related to a specific technology like C#, ASP.NET, JavaScript, Visual Studio 2008/2010, or SQL Server.  It might be a philosophical post involving design patterns and industry-wide best practices.

How is that active engagement?  Well, #1 indicator of success is that you've gotten even this far in the blog post.  If you (the reader) has found even a single blog post worth reading and you (hopefully) even learned something, then it was all worth it.

Blogging is a way for me to write, and thus become a better developer.  During an interview about Stack Overflow, Jeff Atwood advised that developers should blog about everything (blog, blog, blog).  Stack Overflow is a place for less known, but fantastic developers to gain presence in the community.  I found this to be great advice, especially if you're able to blog about something worthwhile time and again.  That lead me to Jeff's blog Coding Horror, and furthermore to an article titled "Is writing More Important Than Programming?"  In the article, Jeff refers to some advice from Joel Spolsky to college students:

"The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage."

As I post things that I've learned, it is important to consider that the ways I am showing are NOT always "the perfect way" to do something.

I hope that future posts may spread inspiration and insight.  Please feel free to comment (in fact, I encourage it).  Let me know if there is something you would like me to post about, or if you would like to see some more in-depth coverage of a certain topic.  Thanks for reading my post, and I hope you return with each new entry.