"Above all, make it fun" - Dave Thomas
My copy of The Pragmatic Programmer showed up on the doorstep today. I started reading it and when I went to close it, I noticed that I completely missed on one of the first pages, the words written, “Above all, make it fun” – Dave Thomas, 2005
Thanks Dave for the nice personal touch!
Some tips that I have enjoyed so far…
Provide Options, Don’t Make Lame Excuses
The book goes on describing some ways of thinking about how you should discuss problems with your client, boss, etc… and gives you a few methods of figuring out all the possible responses that they could come up with. Giving someone productive options towards helping resolve an issue rather than just a reason for it… anyways, it’s a good start off to the book.
Invest Regularly in Your Knowledge Portfolio
Like most of you who came (or are going) to the Rails world, for me, diving into RubyOnRails was a decision that I made several months ago to branch out beyond my PHP, Perl, Python skill set. I was finding that the PHP work that I was doing was becoming stale. I was re-using libraries that I had built in the past, was trying to figure out ways to speed up my development work, was re-using code without duplication… but it seemed to have lost it’s novelty. I was growing old of building simple CRUD applications, was trying to build a generator for forms that worked from my postgresql databases. One day, I noticed the term ‘Rails’ in my RSS Reader. I looked, oh… Ruby, who uses that anyways? I didn’t give it much thought… a learning curve… that I didn’t feel like I had the time to invest.
Another few months ago, and I find myself reading the first ONLamp article… wow, it looks even more interesting all of a sudden. So, I give it a try…. four months later, I find myself writing a book about it.
This year, I am heavily investing into my programming career. I think that a lot of people are doing that (especially in the Rails community). What better time than now?
Take the first step:
gem install rails
