New Year's Resolutions for Programmers

[thewayne]

http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2007/01/new_years_resol.html

Here's a special presentation from the Wired Blogs team: our list of New Year's resolutions. Feel free to apply these to your daily life whether you're a coder or not. And now, our plans for the future...

I will realize that design patterns are a guide, not a religion.

I will bother to research the security issues relevant to my work.

I will spend an hour teaching a child the rudiments of programming, even if it's just "Hello World" in JavaScript.

I will learn how to use Unicode.

I will not respond to requests for help by informing the questioner that they are not only asking the wrong question, but should change the language they program in and/or their Linux distribution.

I will not contribute to lists that anthropomorphize or analogize languages. The lists are funny only in their original incarnations.

I will create one bona-fide playable game, even if it's Tic-Tac-Toe 2007.

I will recognize that not all programs are self documenting, and that this is why comments were invented.

I will contribute to an open-source project because they need my skills, not because I like the project.

I will explain my grep patterns in comments.

I will be nice to the people who pay me.

I will stop procrastinating by cyberstalking my ex-lovers.

I will go back and do something interesting with all my failed, half-finished projects.

I will not use the term "Alpha" when what I really mean is buggy, untested, crap-tastic software.

I will always write Ajax that degrades gracefully (or I will realize that Ajax site navigation is the new "skip intro" of internet design).

I will not try to learn a new language. Instead I will surprise everyone by programming something completely unexpected in one I already know.

I will write ten lines of code everyday for someone I love.

I will continue to pretend Perl 6 is more than myth.

I will stop writing apps that are just giant, nested loops and releasing them as popular software packages. (Here's looking at you, Wordpress theloop.php.)

I will stop making crontab entries to scripts I end up deleting.

I will stop making rsync backup scripts to network devices I end up removing.

I will learn how to write a script that emails me errors instead of sending everything to /dev/null.

I will finally pay for all of the shareware apps that I use daily. No, really.

Compiled by Rob Beschizza, Mike Calore, Scott Gilbertson and Joel Johnson. Photo by Augie Schwer via Flickr.

Comments

[vaudy.livejournal.com]

I think I need to send this list to my most-recent ex-roommate. He's in computer science, so he should appreciate it. Oddly, the first item in the list could apply to knitting, and it definitely applies to weaving.

[deborak]

Here's one more.

"I will learn to use the lj-cut tag." ;-P

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

LOL! My only prob with LJ tags is that they are internally inconsistent. The same could probably be said of HTML tags, but I find it frustrating to try and remember where I need = and which tags needs single versus double quotes.

[cteare.livejournal.com]

That's quite a list. I gave up on computer programming after having to learn assembly language. For me it's much more fun to do art. I can be just as frustrating, but if I make a mistake in a painting I can usually find it a lot faster than in computer code lines.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Assembly is probably the worst possible language to start with. A higher level language such as Pascal or even Basic would have been much better. Then again, I assumed that you started with assembler, which is probably incorrect.

The important thing is to do something that you enjoy. If you get paid for it, that's bonus.

[cteare.livejournal.com]

I started with C++, which wasn't too bad. The next course for the degree was assembly, between that and calculus, I decided it wasn't all that enjoyable.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I've never been a fan of C or C++. I don't like pointers and memory referencing, to me that's a sign of a weak language. In my ever so humble opinion, the language/compiler/OS should take care of all of that for you.

They have their uses, and I have no problem with them being available, but I've always thought that if it becomes an almost absolute must that you have to use them, then that's too much. But I'm one of those freaks who likes COBOL, so pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. ;-)