Author: Tom (Page 272 of 428)

As it relates to developers, it’s been said that certain sites provide a paper trail of the work that we’ve done since we’ve been working in a professional capacity.

For example:

• How many times have you heard that GitHub is your CV?
• Or what about the idea that your blog is a paper trail of your thoughts about the work that you’ve done and/or the industry in which you’re involved?
• Or perhaps you’ve even heard that sites such as Stack Overflow (or any of the other Stack Exchange sites) provide some type of portfolio or journal that provides a glimpse as to the type of information you’re after, and the type of information in which you’re well-versed.

From the outset, I think that the overall idea behind each of the aforementioned points is well-intentioned, but I’ve rarely – if ever – heard an objection to the premise that these sites provide a true CV for a programmer.

That is to say that no one seems to take account that one of the – if the the  – largest factors that stands over each of the points above: Time.

In short, I don’t believe that any of the aforementioned sites (or related material) serve as a CV. If anything, they serve as a documentation of our history in what we’ve been doing.

There’s a very big difference between the two, and if we end up thinking that they provide us with some type of CV, then we may run the risk of missing out on really good contributors, developers, authors, and so on.

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For those of you who are into development or programming of any type and if you read any type of blogs or long form articles that provide tutorials for how to achieve a certain type of task, then you’ve no doubt seen comments that say something along the lines of:

Or you could just use [this library] to solve the problem rather than writing it yourself.

Or maybe you’ll see something like:

There’s no need to do anything like this because XYZ solution already does it.

And it’s not that those types of statements aren’t true or even useful resources, but given in the improper context, I think they can seriously put a damper on the motivation people have for writing tutorials and/or reading tutorials because they tend to say that there’s no point in understanding how to do it in a given way when something else already does it.

It’s as if everything is reduced to reinventing the wheel – but it’s not.

For those of us who are genuinely interested in programming, isn’t part of the reason that we got into the field was not only to build things, but because we have an insatiable curiosity for how things work?

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I rarely – if ever – write on Saturday, but this is something short and sweet so it seems to be okay. One of the aspects of this site is that I end to write articles that vary between 700 – 1000 words (not including code).

With as much information as we’re inundated with on a daily basis, I can’t help but wonder if some of those posts are being lost in the shuffle, marked as read because of the lack of time people have (and believe me, I know we all have a lack of time), or if it’s too much to digest each day of the week.

I know that a lot of people are against the daily blogging thing, a lot of people are for it, and that’s fine with me – we’ve got our opinions and our preferences to which we’re all entitled, and we have the ability to choose what we want to read, what we don’t want to read, and when we want to read it.

To that end, the schedule at which a person blogs has never been an issue for me; however, personally, I’ve noticed that longer form articles can be a bit of a time sink when I want to read them, but don’t have the ability to do so.

So I’ve got a question for those who are willing to give some honest feedback.

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