Under-exposed Programmer
Somewhere it has been mentioned that a step in improving oneself as a programmer is to make a list of programmers you admire and — that’s where I stop. I have been so terribly under-exposed to programmers, let alone good programmers, that I have been working in a near-vacuum the past dozen years. I’ve seen and maintained my fair share of bad code; in fact among my friends we constantly try to steal the “I have the worst code-base to maintain” award. I know what bad code looks like. What I don’t have exposure to is good code, and good programmers.
There are good programmers out there, ones far better than I, and I want to find some. I would love to work alongside at least one before I retire from this industry. My only question now is who are these programmers and how can I be exposed to their work? I’m open to suggestions.
Comments
I asked myself the same question when that article came out. My first thought was that since I was reading yegge's article, I might as well look for some of his code too. Since I'm an emacs guy, this was valuable, since yegge writes some awesome elisp.
Aside from that, I've found that github makes this task almost trivial. I found a project I knew about (and whose code I thought was good), looked at all the contributors, then looked at all the projects they've got, and looked at their contributors, and so on with this run-on sentence. There's hundreds of decent codebases there, all of which will probably make a reader better of for having read them.
Just my $0.02
Posted by: JD Huntington | July 9, 2008 9:22 AM
Perhaps a discussion on determining good code from bad, and how to find them among the vast library of OSS is in order?
Posted by: Seth Croston Barber
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July 9, 2008 9:39 AM