You want to be a programmer?
But, you have no time
No one has time!
The rise of billion dollar startups that get acquired in 6 months (or longer, perhaps) from launch gives a false impression that programming is easy, and hence shouldn’t take very long to learn. After all, you have a billion dollar idea you would like to start working on.
Let’s conduct a small study. Why don’t you spend an hour on StackOverflow? Why? To observe how users, without doing any research, ask the same questions over and over and over again. They just want to learn how this works, not why this works and not something else. I’m possibly guilty of the same mistakes, and I have been trying to amend them ever since.
You need this
As a result of these observations, and experience in teaching, I’ve come up up with a list of few qualities that can make you a better programmer:
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Learner - Learning never stops for a programmer and that’s the fun of it. You will have to spend extra hours every week to brush up your skills, gain new skills, and get better at your trade.
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Committed - It’s not easy to become a programmer. It will require a lot of commitment, practice, and more programming, of course.
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Investigative - You may end up spending days trying to fix a Javascript memory leak, or why your Rails app is running slow and leaking memory. It will require a lot of investigation, research and thinking about every aspect of the application, and it’s behaviour. You will have to read API documents, source code, and so on.
All in all, it’s not going to be easy.
Now, do you still want to be a programmer?