Become a better programmer

Im a young guy, and I do not have any formal CS or engineering education, so most of my programming has been from the hip. As a result, I have picked up and maintained a few habits that I wish I hadn’t, and skipped a few steps that would have probably saved me a lot of trouble. I also have a bad habit of abandoning projects when my ever changing train of thought derails or starts running backwards.

I would like to become the type of programmer that is able to apply himself efficiently and consistently, so that I may someday beable to look back on the countless hours of cathode ray tube induced radiation therapy I have undergone, and say “Hey, that was a productive and meaningful obsession”.

I graduated with a computer science degree this year, you’d think I’ve be awesome at it by now? Nope, still learning everyday at my job… This is just the nature of it, always something new to learn. This will always be on my list.

I program as a hobby, but I want to master Quick Basic and if I ever get my hands on a manual, GFA-BASIC. I love Profan2, but my German is terrible, so I can forget trying to master it. But it’s cool to mess around in… I can do windows easily than I can in GFA. I just dislike the Windows environment so much…

I am Dot Net Programmer, and I want to improve my programming logic.

C++ is too hard :(

I’ve subscribed to Sang Shin’s online J2EE course, which I think is great. I’m also reading about developing web applications in java and I really want to use some day everything I learn.

Since I left college for a semester, I figured out I had to occupy myself with something, so I grabbed a huge-ass book about C and set myself a commitment: in 1 month I had to get the hang on implementing data structures in C. Yes, in C.

It really worked. Now I have a spankin’ new, fully functional linked list sitting in my hard drive, and I even took a couple of minutes to port the whole thing to Java. It even served me to notice the difference between C and Java: C involves a lot of tedious manual work, while Java takes care of that stuff automatically and lets you focus on your program.

I declare this thing complete!

I did this week long course a few weeks ago. I got so much from this and am still digesting the material we covered. This has made me a better programmer.

It was intense.

http://www.jpboodhoo.com/training.oo

I would recommend this to anyone who is serious about advanced .NET, patterns, tools and OO development.

Check out JP’s videos on DNRTV to catch his style.

For the winner!! ...I won a free source programing contest in my country (Spain) : www.zenphp.es :)

It took me a while to realize this, but as I went into managing projects, I hardly ever do any coding anymore.
There is no chance I will get any better. Too bad…I was just getting into AJAX and after years of programming JavaScript people are beginning to recognize it as a “real” language.

I will change this goal to “become a good project manager” or something like that.