#developer tea

Listening to: Taking Best Practices and Advice with a Grain of Salt

Welcome to my blog! Since I am currently using my own domain (jamesandthegiantweb.com) as a temporary hosting platform for my employer SiCore Tech’s new website, for now this will be my home on tumblr at www.tumblr.com/zedforzardoz (say what you want about John Boorman, it’s a trashy good movie).

So what are we doing here today?

The other day I was listening to Jonathan Cutrell’s fantastic podcast Developer Tea (@DeveloperTea) and had the fortune of stumbling upon this great episode with John Sonmez.  John Sonmez has quickly become one of my development heroes.  He embodies (quite literally) the kind of developer I want to become.  He has an awesome blog Simple Programmer and a podcast called Get Up and Code which is all about incorporating fitness and health into your life as a programmer.  

I am totally enamored with this idea.  John advocates that to be a great developer you have to take a holistic approach.  Your physical and emotional well being are intrinsically tied to your ability to work in a disciplined and effective manner and to be able to communicate and collaborate well with others (a key facet of becoming great).  Taking care of yourself is sustainable, it prevents you from burning out and allows you true longevity as a developer.  Furthermore, it is important to remember why you are doing any of this in the first place.

For me personally, becoming a software developer is maybe 10% about the attractiveness of the material benefits (a number I intend to decrease as I become more solid financially), the other 90% is about fulfilling my potential.  It is about challenging and expanding as much of myself as possible; my creative self, my technical self, and my social self.  As I see it, developers like John are setting the example that if you are not happy coding, if it is not a true joy, then it does not matter what you have accomplished or how many people know your name, you have failed yourself.  

So needless to say, I am on board.  In the episode of Developer Tea, Jonathan Cutrell (another awesome influence btw) talks to John Sonmez about his new book, Soft Skills: The Software Developer’s Life Manual.  In Soft Skill’s Sonmez covers everything about development that is not specifically development.  Health, wellness, fitness, career advice is all in there.  I cannot attest to the book’s actual greatness as I am still waiting for my copy to arrive, but check out that amazon page and you will see just how many 5 star reviews he gets.  Specifically, Sonmez calls out to developers to be their own spokesperson.  Write a blog, speak at an event, get your name out there.  

So I am a some-what tech savvy communications major (actually it’s Culture and Media Studies but we can get into that later)  just like Jonathan Cutrell claims to have been and I have decided I want to become a kickass software developer.  

So where do I start?  I am only an egg..

I’m just now scraping by some awesome tutorials such as Eloquent JavaScript and Ruby Monk. I am in the middle of my very first programming classes at Suffolk County Community College and I am enjoying my progress but I know I am not yet knowledgeable enough to contribute to projects on Github or Code Triage.  What I can offer is my perspective.  I may not know much about writing code yet, but I know a decent amount about writing English (hahaha), and I know there has to be other zygotes out there who are struggling just like me.  People like me who want to contribute but are not sure how.  People like me who might benefit hearing from someone who is at their level right now.  

I intend this blog to be a forum for my thoughts as I progress.  Sometimes I find certain roadblocks when asking developers who are much further along for advice.  If I ask a more experienced friend for a book recommendation they will often recommend something that they discovered more recently, as a more “pure” tome, but if you ask them how they learned in the first place, they often will not remember very well.  

I think this is because being an infant coder is not that different from being an infant.  How can you remember your early stages of development (or development development hehe) when you barely have the vocabulary to understand what you are learning yet?  Just like infants learning to speak, coders learn to do what they do in a countless variety of ways.  I would argue that no two paths are quite the same.  So it is my intention to document my journey, and hopefully if and when I can consider myself a true software developer, I can look back on this blog and pull from these experiences as a way of enriching my own life and the journeys’ of others.