All the Codist needs to know about better programming he learned in kindergarten

It’s a weekend, it’s Easter Sunday, and it’s a pretty slow news day. Now, what follows isn’t news of any kind, but it could serve as a guide for all of you programmers and coders out there working on your homebrew projects.

Taking a page from Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, the Codist has come up with a list of things that every programmer needs to keep in mind in order to be a good one. “Programming is complicated stuff,” says the Codist, “but a lot of what makes a good programmer isn’t all that different from the earliest learning we did in school.”

It’s more geared towards professional programmers, but it could just as well apply for all non-pros and amateurs out there. The full list is behind the “read” link, but here are a few snippets off of it:

1. Share everything. Use open source where possible, and contribute to it when you are able. The collective wisdom of the entire community is better than the limited vision of a few large companies.

2. Play fair. Give other technologies, frameworks, methodologies and opinions a chance. Don’t think your choices are the only ones that work. The other choices may very well be better than yours; it doesn’t hurt to check them out with an open mind.

3. Don’t hit people. Like #2, don’t attack people just because they happen to use .Net or Java or PHP (I learned my lesson there!). Sometimes they might be more usable and useful than you think. You can learn a lot more from someone when you are not pounding them to a pulp.

It’s a weekend, it’s Easter Sunday, and it’s a pretty slow news day. Now, what follows isn’t news of any kind, but it could serve as a guide for all of you programmers and coders out there working on your homebrew projects.

Taking a page from Robert Fulghum’s “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”, the Codist has come up with a list of things that every programmer needs to keep in mind in order to be a good one. “Programming is complicated stuff,” says the Codist, “but a lot of what makes a good programmer isn’t all that different from the earliest learning we did in school.”

It’s more geared towards professional programmers, but it could just as well apply for all non-pros and amateurs out there. The full list is behind the “read” link, but here are a few snippets off of it:

1. Share everything. Use open source where possible, and contribute to it when you are able. The collective wisdom of the entire community is better than the limited vision of a few large companies.

2. Play fair. Give other technologies, frameworks, methodologies and opinions a chance. Don’t think your choices are the only ones that work. The other choices may very well be better than yours; it doesn’t hurt to check them out with an open mind.

3. Don’t hit people. Like #2, don’t attack people just because they happen to use .Net or Java or PHP (I learned my lesson there!). Sometimes they might be more usable and useful than you think. You can learn a lot more from someone when you are not pounding them to a pulp.