As a poster also mentioned, experience matters. I work with the best and brightest in the field (disclaimer: I’m a Software Engineer at Google), and I can’t think of a single person here who has been coding for less than a decade. I’ve been coding myself for 19 years – the majority of my life. There’s no substitute for putting in the time and writing code. Reading books isn’t a substitute for writing code. Reading other people’s code can teach you valuable lessons and give you insights, but they will fade quickly unless you write code using them.

Ultimately, coding is an intuitive process. Mastery comes not from learning rules and patterns from books or others, but from internalizing patterns of thought required to solve a problem to the extent that you can devise most solutions without thinking. After a while, you just know how to do it. It’s the practice of writing real code and solving real problems which gets you there.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rockstar%20Programmer

By definition, a rockstar is all about popularity with a particular audience. If you shine yet none can see you are more likley a hidden gem. Therefore a rockstar needs to “communicate” his/her awesomeness effectively. It’s what you’re doing with this blog, I’d guess. More time “understanding” the rockstar domain will get you there. Pun intended.

-Max

-Max

-Max

I think one of the problems in working with software is that it’s so complex that it would take a lifetime or more for an individual programmer to derive all of the laws of software design by himself, just by working on his own programming tasks. Ultimately, to some degree we have to learn from the theories and experiences of others, although of course we still have to use our own judgment about what’s right and wrong.

-Max

There have been times where my knowledge from other areas of the IT world have come in handy. I’ve been able to rescue some of my colleagues who were already focused on some task and had overlooked something that was obvious to me, but unclear to them, mainly because they were intent on solving the problem, but also because the nature of that problem slipped under their troubleshooting radar.

I’ve known some developers who have embraced and are fluent in the high-level design and architectural aspects of say WCF services, but don’t know what a command prompt is. While on the surface these seem unrelated, what if the WCF service is consumed by a console application client, and the creator puts the blame on the service? It helps to know well the platform that you’re coding for, including its various subsystems, in order to be better able to understand and do what you’re trying to do, as you suggest.

Thought provoking post! Bookmarked.

I actually don’t know what a circular register is, and Google isn’t being too helpful. Care to enlighten me?

-Max

Even languages like java, while not directly interfacing with cpu registers, are using a form or registers behind the scene.

More advanced users should be introduced to different types of registers. My favorite is the circular register. It fascinates me how it is efficient because of the way it maintains space due to the consideration of the common locality of functions and arguments.

I might be a better programmer now. But I still make bugs. I can still have moments of huge doubt about my decisions. And I still have to think really hard at times. I’ve become more laid back, but the job as a whole certainly hasn’t become relaxing

I’ve got this project of mine where I want to create an organisational platform for businesses to run a lot like social networks, building on peer coordination and remuneration. The program compiles and runs stable. But it still doesn’t work satisfactory, in terms of working for the potential users. This is, I learned, the ultimate measure of a working program. Not the bug count or whether it builds. So now I’m in the middle of a rewrite and hoping that next time I’ll get it better

-Max

At this point I can say this:

1. Yes, experience does count

2. I write better and more beautiful code now, but despite that, as a whole I haven’t become significantly more effective

3. Programming doesn’t get easier

-Max

-Max

-Max

Unfortunately most education are taking out such “raw” courses in favor of for example GUI design techniques. Also relevant, sure, but not instead.