It's been a long time from my last post...
... so let's talk: Are you smart?
In fact, I just read this post (lengthy post) by Steve Yegge and the funny thing was that I were just thinking about how not smart I am. (Note: Blogger shortcuts Ctrl+I,B,... not work on Safari on a Mac?). Watching his talk at Google I/O 2008 got me thinking "Uau, I'm really a low level developer", then I went to his blog and saw the article "Done, and Gets Things Smart".
In fact this is not a really bad felling, you know, if you get too confident you make mistakes, thats the way things are. It's the same when you judge your skills at some field, as a developer who always searches about the trends in my field I face the overwhelming amount of information that I don't have every day. Languages, frameworks, things that were good patterns and now are listed at anti-patterns, new development tools, new debug techniques, new testing frameworks and so on.
- I should make a parenthesis here about patterns.
The overuse of about anything creates a bad thing, like your plate at lunch. Nutritionists says the tonal variance of your plate is a good sign. If fill up your code with patterns this is NOT a good sign. Patterns have a defined problem they try to solve, if you fill your code with patterns, after patterns, after patterns, in a simple view, you have problems, and problems, and problems at your code. A good way to approach a pattern use is: "Oh! How I gonna solve this problem? Maybe someone thought about it and came with a solution." And not "Oh! What patterns I should use to build my application?".
- Back to the main subject.
After read hundreds of blog posts every day, articles, watch talks and so on, you should not (as I try too) get depressed. There two main reasons I can think of, the first is that your field is growing fast, this means jobs, money and space for everyone how likes technology. The second reason is that you are trying to keep with the wave, you are searching for improvement and surely you'll be a better professional tomorrow than you are today. Of course a filter should be applied in the enormous amount of info, but we learn how to choose the right information with time.
The message is: Be smart in not being smart, do the things you know, what you don't know go outside and learn it. As the greek philosopher Socrates said "I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance" and the oracle of Delphi stated that he was the wisest man.
[]'s and keepcoding.