My dear friend Ochronus posted an article titled Top 5 trends and technologies in software development that got me thinking. My thoughts below. Go check Ochronus’s blog if you haven’t, he is the lead developer at Arukereso.hu.
I agree with the suggestions from the original article. Yet, I would like to change the order a little bit; DVCS and then agile (with lowercase a) and then the rest. None of my points below are cool trends, in fact I can guarantee most of you will find them boring. But I think they are all important. OK, I hope you are all psyched now. Here we go:
1. Be Careful With The Buzz
Trends are cool. What could be wrong about following cutting edge stuff? We all want to be up to date, no? I think it’s good to follow the trends if you have the experience and the ability to filter the BS. I know a young developer who was constantly going back and forth between Rails/Ruby and Django/Python. I haven’t heard from him for a while, but he is probably still doing that same dance. Why? Because his considerations were solely based on buzz, not on simple requirements analysis or technical comparisons or personal experience.
2. Learn And Use An Old-Fashioned Modern Low-Level Scripting Language
To all the scripting people, like me, out there: you need to have an understanding of what’s happening under the hood. At the least to appreciate our high-level environments, at the most to become genuinely good programmers. Being a Python person myself, I think the best low-level language to be proficient for me is C. Many other high-level languages have C interfaces. So investing the time to learn C should pay off one way or the other.
3. Do Less Web Programming
Aren’t we doing a lot of web programming these days? Actually I think doing X development exclusively is bad for your programming muscles. Web programming, enterprise work or system scripting, it doesn’t matter. But web programming happens more than anything else. Maybe some of you have only been playing with it, but there are a huge number of us doing nothing but web programming. This is so sad; both in an individual level and for the community at large.
4. Learn How To Educate Yourself
What is a noob? Here is a definition and disambiguation (from newbie):
Newbs are those who are new to some task and are very beginner at it, possibly a little overconfident about it, but they are willing to learn and fix their errors to move out of that stage. n00bs, on the other hand, know little and have no will to learn any more. They expect people to do the work for them and then expect to get praised about it, and make up a unique species of their own.
Make an active effort not to be a noob. Learn how to ask smart questions, how to communicate others and seek help. Being polite is good but actually improving and being a valuable member of the community is much, much better.
5. Open Source Properly
It’s great to open source your project. But please do it properly. There are already too many unmaintained, undocumented projects out there that noone seem to care. Do you really have to add to that? As is argument doesn’t make much sense today. But if you really have to make an open source dead drop, please at least document the status of your project and your intentions clearly.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some you think they all are obvious. But if they are so obvious then why are they widely being ignored? Is it because they are under-retweeted, under-reddited and therefore not trendy.
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Tags: competence, free software, netiquette, open source, python, social media
Atamert Olcgen: Top 5 Untrends According To Me http://bit.ly/cflU4x
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
I agree completely.
Be careful with the buzz: Of course, everything should be taken with a grain of salt. Test new technologies thoroughly and only employ them if they solve a problem that cannot (easily) be solved with existing, well-tested technologies.
Oh yes, learning what’s going on near the machine’s heart is very important. A scripting language isn’t a replacement for low-level knowlegde, the two aren’t exchangeable.
Again a very good point. I find myself longing for good old platform-coding and algorithms. Lately I dipped my toe in Cocoa an iPhone coding. Earlier some java EE stuff. It was refreshing after php/rails crunching.
Absolutely a must! Also there’s so much information that one can’t possibly hold everyting in head, be sure to know how to look up stuff and find information with ease.
That’s exactly why I tend to have a strange bad feeling in my guts when someone’s approaching me with a great new open source alternative. Only a tiny fragment of OSS is maintained well unfortunately.
Some neat #advices about being a #developer : http://is.gd/81SmK
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
@codemonkeyism like this one more: http://www.muhuk.com/2010/02/top-5-untrends-according-to-me/
This comment was originally posted on Twitter
[...] old friend Muhuk has written a nice follow-up on this topic here – many good points, be sure to check it [...]
Great list for sure.
I do agree about learning some about C, it surely gives you a better understanding of what happens under the hood.
And I totally agree about doing something else than web dev. Working with different limits and constraints is a sure way to challenge yourself and work outisde your comfort zone, which is good to learn some new lessons and gain some extra confidence.
Perhaps get involved in some of mobile application development. Mobile devices are very much in trend and working on them will provide a new insight on development considering the constraints that mobile devices face.
@Kevin that’s a good idea. Mobile devices are probably the future, so this is surely in my top 10 (if not top 5).
jQTouch is a very interesting project in this regard.
Using something like jQTouch though is going back to doing that one type of programming (assuming you are a web developer) and that’s web programming.
Why not learn objective-c and all the iPhone stuff away from just the web ?
Just my two cents on that