There are a lot of programmers out there who are self-taught and even the ones that have had formal training may not have considered the importance of having effective workflow patterns to make the most of their skills and time. Facebook’ technical coach Kent Beck has some advice to share on how to develop workflow patterns that may help you on journey as a programmer or developer.
Programmer image from Shutterstock
When you’re faced with a problem as a programmer, it’s tempting to just jump right in to solve it and working things out along the way. While that approach may work for some, it’s probably not the most efficient way to tackle the problem. Beck said he has noticed that a lot of skilled programmers are prone to doing this and what they need to do to elevate themselves to the expert level is to enforce workflow patterns:
“The theme here is scaling your brain. The journeyman learns to solve bigger problems by solving more problems at once. The master learns to solve even bigger problems than that by solving fewer problems at once. Part of the wisdom is subdividing so that integrating the separate solutions will be a smaller problem than just solving them together.”
If your programming style is all over the shop and you want to bring some order to your professional life, you can use Beck’s ideal workflow pattern, published on a Facebook post, to guide you through the process.
[Via Facebook]
Comments
2 responses to “To Become An Expert Programmer, You Need To Have A Good Workflow Pattern”
Am a hobby programmer. Make fun things with php. At the moment am playing with the API of youtube. Thanks for the article BTW. I tend to grab answers (others code) to solve problems. Can’t count the number of times i have found answers (others code) to php questions at stackoverflow.com by using google. Always work to understand what others have done.
love stackoverflow… such an awesome repository of niche knowledge