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

[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.