Friday, September 10, 2010

Increase your real-time collaboration

Developers are a lot better off when they get to "pair" with peers and analysts who can help them think through the problem and the plan for solving it. Coding is not easy. Learning new programming languages (any language for that matter) is not easy.

Learning languages rapidly should be one of the core capabilities of a programmer: "Oh, you only know one language or skillset / toolset? Sorry, I don't need you."

I'm sure some programmers prefer to read a book and learn the language that way. That's fine but to me this seems slow and tedious and may not even work. Maybe you don't even need that knowledge once you have it. But then again, I'm really not a book reader, I'm more of a doer and web-searcher and like to unblock myself now, when I'm stuck.

Enter the web, books, and peers.

I want to pick a project that requires (or might require) a technology and try to solve a problem with the technology through practice. It'd be nice to have someone that's used the technology to work with me but it's not required. They just have to be a programmer that's willing to learn and be stumped.

This might sound slow and tedious but at least I'm diving in and going for it; and building my network.

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