The Passionate Programmer — Chad Fowler[2009]
A brief review
I really enjoyed the way this book is written, it feels like reading a blog or a thread of tweets, the small chunks into which the book is sliced allows the reader to stop and continue with the book in anytime, so because of that the reading became more easily and smooth. Also I liked all the little advices (Act on it!) that are at the end of the chapters.
One thing I don´t like it too much is the way the author writes, I mean I like to read about experiences in order to get a valuable lesson or knowledge in general but the way Chads write this advices felts like a little rude, I felt like if didn’t agree with him he would make fun of me and because I don’t fell like a master in the programming matter some times I felt like he was discipline me in a rude way.
About what I learned in this book i’ll write general points of what I consider the most important, is not all the book offers, but it’s what I take from this book.
Risks and rewards
Investigate about the relationship between the market and the state of the art in an area or technology of your interest, with respect to these results, know your skills and finally decide if you are willing to:
Make a bet to go the way you want to go (maybe it’s not worth it or maybe it isn’t mature enough to spend a large part of your life on this path)
Stay where you are is ok but you must know that the future will looks the same and therefore there will be no big changes in your life, with all the good and bad that that entails.
Remember that the great benefits come with the great risks; you do not need to change your professional life pattern if you don’t want to, but remember that if you don’t do it, the benefits will be moderate or even null, stay alert and prepare yourself for the changes.
Teach and learn
You need to understand the business in were you are, only that way you’ll master the matter, in order to achieve this you need not only learn from someone who knows more than you, you need to teach someone that doesn’t know so much than you, in other words you’ll became an apprentice and a mentor, this last part will let you know how strong are the basis of your current knowledge. Transfer what you know it’s not only something good for the person who will receive the knowledge, it’s also good for you, besides it will improve your kwonledge basis as I previously said, it will also help with the impostor syndrome because you’ll prove yourself that you’re not one of these and you deserve good stuff derivates from your work.
All this things also will let you find and improve a methodology you’ll master in some point, in this point it would be a great idea automated anything that it’s consuming time and efforts that you can save, remember that the time is one of the most valuable things in the world, make everything you can to preserve it.
Perform
To have a successful action it is necessary to have a good attitude, if you take things calmly things will pass calmly, worse if you consider your work as a jail or something you do not want to do, this will make everything that involves your diary be heavy and therefore very difficult to finish. Having a good attitude in the face of adversity can help you not only to finish your work on time, but also to finish earlier and this will lead to errors that you would otherwise hard to find and resolve.
In order to have a good attitude and optimal performance in your work, you must remember that you are not alone, I mean, your work is intertwined with your colleagues work and if you do something difficult to understand it will only cause your colleagues to take longer time to finish their work. To avoid this it is a good idea to organize yourself well and be as descriptive as possible in what you do, it is also a good approach to document all your actions. Remember that it is valid to ask your peers and your manager, this one is in charge on you can climb in the company to a better position (or go to another that suits your ambitions more), that is why a manager is very important and being aligned in terms of goals with her or him is not only something valuable but essential if you want to be successful, in the end not only you will be successful, but everyone who is in the same environment and that is a good thing for everyone .
Communications and connections
When I previously said that you’re not alone I not only mean your co-workers and in general the people in the company were you work, I mean that your communications skills must reach the people outside the company. The clients and even the providers of services you use for your work are valuable people and deserves you treat them with respect. This respect involves also the way you write I mean you must communicate with the less mistakes you can, if you can reach this level of good communication it will be natural to also reach a good human connections with the people around you.
Another thing that it’s importante is know these people in order to make a real connection and understand why something that maybe not means a lot to you it really important for the other person, like a quote from Benjamin Franklin says:
Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.
Only if we involve with the agreements and terms we made we’ll know about the importance they really have.
Move
The song “Moviento” from Jorge Dexler says:
If you want something to die, let it still.
This lyric says the truth, so in order to not let our careers die we must move. The change is the natural order of things and if we remember the state of art in the tech industry five years in the past we can agree that a lot of things change, new technologies arrive and others were deprecated.
So when I say we must move I mean we need to invest time in searching from a new technologies, research them and see which of these are good enogh to jump in them, evaluated our own development and get on tracks of never stop to learning, if there’s something that represent a blocker, we must search a way to pass over it, if we cannot do much in the company we’re working for, jump again and go in the independent path of the entrepenaur.
The main idea is never stop and became a better person everyday.
