How To Be a Good Developer and Professional

Hello and welcome to third blog of the series "Freshers to Professional" blog. In case you missed previous blogs, you can read here.

Part 1 : Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once
Part 2 : Some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time

This blog is about self evaluation. After reading this blog, you will realize  if you have what it takes to be a great developer and if you are have not this symptoms ,you have to find out your Knack.

You Should Have Knack Of Technology.

According to definition in dictionary meaning of Knack is.

• A special talent or skill, especially one difficult to explain or teach
• A skilful, ingenious, or resourceful way of doing something
• A particular talent or aptitude, esp an intuitive one

So yes you need to have special talent and clear aptitude and particular attitude to be a good developer. In short you should have Knack of Technology like Little Dilbert

So yes you should be like Little Dilbert to be a great software engineer.  You should have Knack of technology and if you don't have it then you have to find it or develop it. Next we will see some questions that you have to ask yourself and find out if you have that knack or not. 

Do you like sitting in front of computer for long time? 

This if the first and foremost requirement to be a developer. Because as a developer you have to sit in front of computer and write code of long time. As you will be given a task and deadline to complete it and you have to meet that deadline. So you have to sit for long time and complete it. Sometime you may have to skip lunch, tea or dinner, you should be ready for it. In short it will be your "RACE AGAINST TIME" and you have to win it.

 Do you like to learn new things?

This is another most crucial requirement to be a good developer. Your learning will not stop after your college course. If you think I have studied enough and I will not invest my time to learn something new, you are at the dead end of your career. Because technologies come and go. Nothing is permanent. What is hot technology today will be out of the market tomorrow and something new will come and if you are not willing to learn new thing, you will be out of the race. Take an examples of programming languages.

There was a time where developers were using languages like C, C++
Then comes Java.
Then comes VB.NET, C#.net
Then comes PHP

Earlier there was VB script, then we have JavaScript

Earlier there was Objective C and now we have Swift

Earlier there was no cloud computing, now we have Cloud Computing

So things are constantly changing and if you are not willing to except change then you can not be good developer so you have to learn new things and adopt and survive it.

Can you keep calm in worst condition?

Coding is an art that we have to do with calm and composed mind. You should not be short tempered. Because while coding you may have to face situation where no matter what you do error is not resolved, you are trying for hours to get something working and it's not working as expected, you are not getting proper output. In this situation if you loose you calm and get angry then it will get worse and you will never be able to solve your problem. Do you know one missing semi colon in code can create nightmare for you. In this situation you should not get angry and search for error. Debugging is the process which needs lots of patience. You have to debug step by step and it is real time consuming.

Sometime you may have to face situation like your work is over written due to mistake or it's rejected by your leader or client and he asked you do do it again. In this case you should not punch into face of your leader or client but KEEP CALM AND CODE ON.

Do you think twice before start working?

Whenever some task is assigned to you, you have to think twice and look for the best possible solution to achieve it. Don't just start working on it with first thought come up in mind. It may be possible that you end up with disaster and you have to redo everything. And at start of your career, you could be fired for not performing well and this can ruin your career. So be careful about it and think twice before you start working on it.

Do you listen to others?

It's about being team player. In your career hardly it will happen that you will be the only person working on the project, there is always a team and when you are working in team, you have to listen to others because everyone like to give opinion and you have to deal with it, It may be possible that you gave solution to some task but from your team someone else come up with better solution. so you have to listen to them and understand what your team members are trying to say. So be a good listener, keep your ego aside and be a good team player.

Do you communicate with others?

Communicate with others is as important as listening to others. That is again a quality of team player. Your team members should be aware of what you are doing and what problems you are facing. It's possible that your work is affecting someone else's work. You have to communicate with them and inform about it. Same way if you are working on someone else work then you to ask them first about it understand it and then work on it. This will lead to less errors.

Do you like Algorithms and Flow Charts?

Most of the course on software development includes algorithms and flow charts. When you are studying it you may find it worthless and waste of time but it's actually not a waste of time. Algorithms and Flow charts are key elements of development. When you will be working on any task you have to break down it to smaller tasks and setup the flow as per the domain you are working. For example if you are building online selling website then to place an order there is a flow like

Customer registered

Customer add billing and shipping address

Customer makes payment

If payment is successful, place an order else show error. 

so that's the flow and for that you have to make up a flow chart in your mind and code as the flow. 

Same way for the difficult task you have algorithm, which is nothing but a plan to solve the problem and you have to create that plan. If you don't like algorithms then you will not be able to solve complex problems.

Do you know how to search on Google?

In the era of internet and Google, there lots of websites and forums and blogs where developers like you and me write about the problems we are facing and others in the communities give solution to this. I also maintain a blog where I write about problems  I face during my work and solution of it on 

Hiren's Technical Blog

So it's possible that problem you are facing is already faced by someone else and there is solution already but you have to search it and find it. For this you should know how to search effectively on Google and find out solution and save your time.

Do you consider worst outcome while coding?

This is one common problem I have seen in all the developers. When they are working on some tasks, they just consider the best outcome and assume that all the inputs will be available. But this is not the case always, you have to make sure that you consider worst scenario as well and handle it properly. Do not assume that you will have all the possible inputs. If you don't consider worst scenario there will be lots of problems.

Do you take responsibility of your work and do not blame others?

As I mentioned, it's team play and in the team whenever something goes wrong, blame game starts. Nobody would like to receive criticism and try to blame others when project failed. But as a good ethical developer, you have to accept your mistake and take responsibility of your work and be open about it. There is no shame in accepting your mistakes. 

If your answer is Yes to above all the questions that means you are going to be a good developer. If your answer is NO for some questions that means you need to improve in that area but if your answer is NO for all the questions, I am afraid that you are not qualified to be a developer.  Go for other career option.

Some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time

Hello and welcome to second blog of the series "Freshers to Professional" blog. In case you missed previous blogs, you can read here.

Part 1 : Because All The Leaders Were Developers Once

This blog is again going to be a blog for motivation. A programmer is a person who writes the computer programs. There are those few who have contributed beyond what a single programmer usually does in an entire lifetime. They gave us reason to achieve something. In this blog we will take a look at some of the Greatest Programmers of All Time. Some of them are not with us right now but we can not forget them. These programmers are pioneers of the IT industry. Their contribution can never be forgotten. They are legends of IT industry and are role models of many aspiring programmers like you and me. Let's see some of the great programmers of all time.

Dennis Ritchie - Father of Digital Computing

Yes he is the one the best programmers of all time. He is the inventor of C language and Unix operating system. Today most of the programs and technologies uses C language and  Unix is the base operating  system, from which all the OS like Windows and Mac is created. We can say that without him all the companies like Apple and Microsoft would not exist today. Entire software industry owe a lot to this man. He is truly a father of digital computing. He won prestigious Turing Award for his research and development of Unix and also won National Medal of Technology. Unfortunately he is not with us right now but his legacy is still going on and he will be remembered forever for his contribution.

Ken Thompson - Co Inventor of Unix

Ken Thompson is an American pioneer of computer science. Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system. He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems. Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language.

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle.

Grace Hopper - Inventor of COBOL and the Word "BUG"

Grace Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy Rear Admiral.In 1944, she was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer and invented the first compiler for a computer programming language. She popularized the idea of machine-independent programming languages, which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages. She also popularized use of the term BUG (already established in other technical contexts) which frightens all the developers. There is an interesting story about how the word BUG was invented. 

In early days when computers were so big and they were using big hardwares, US navy was using such computers and Grace Hopper was managing one such computer. One day computer was not working and she opened it to check it and found out that one bug was squeezed and dead in computer hardware and that stopped computer. While she was removing dead body of bug his superior came in and asked what's going and she replied "I am removing BUG" and since then word Bug is used for hardware and software failures.

Bjarne Stroustrup - Inventor of C++

Bjarne Stroustrup is a Danish computer scientist who is credited for the creation and the development of the widely used and highly successful C++ programming language. He not only invented it, but also evolved it, all by himself, by writing its early definitions, producing its first implementation, formulating its design criteria, designing all its major facilities, processing extension proposals for standards committee and its standard textbook.

James Gosling - Inventor of Java

James Arthur Gosling is a Canadian computer scientist and an officer of the order of Canada. He has coded quite a number of programs but is widely known for his creation of the highly successful and commonly used Java programming language in 1994 as well as its original virtual machine and compiler.

Donald Knuth - Father of the Analysis of Algorithms

Donald Ervin Knuth is an American computer scientist and mathematician as well as a Professor Emeritus (retired professor) at Stanford University. Knuth has been dubbed as the “Father of the Analysis of Algorithms” as he has contributed to the development of rigorous analysis of the computational complexity of algorithms and systematized formal mathematical techniques for it.

Knuth has also popularized the asymptotic notation and he is also the creator of the TeX computer typesetting system and the METAFONT font definition language and rendering system. He has contributed to several branches of theoretical computer science and has also created the Computer Modern family of typefaces.

Tim Berners-Lee - Father of World Wide Web (WWW)

Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee is a British computer scientist who is renowned all across the globe because of his creation of the World Wide Web as well as the implementation of the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet in November, 1989.

Tim has won multiple awards for his pioneering ingeniousness such as becoming one of only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame and one of five Internet and Web pioneers who have been awarded the inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. He is also the holder of the Founders Chair at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Margaret Hamilton - Lady who helped Mankind to Reach To Moon

Margaret Heafield Hamilton is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design.

Linus Torvald  - Inventor of Linux

Created the Linux kernel and Git, an open source version control system. Winner of numerous awards and honors, including the EFF Pioneer Award in 1998, the British Computer Society’s Lovelace Medal in 2000, the Millenium Technology Prize in 2012 and the IEEE Computer Society’s Computer Pioneer Award in 2014. Also inducted into the Computer History Museum’s Hall of Fellows in 2008 and the Internet Hall of Fame in 2012.

Jeff Dean - Compilers don't warn Jeff Dean. Jeff Dean warns compilers

Helped to design and implement many of Google’s large-scale distributed systems, including website crawling, indexing and searching, AdSense, MapReduce, BigTable  and Spanner. Elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2009. 2012 winner of the ACM’s SIGOPS Mark Weiser Award and the ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in the Computing Sciences.

Well this list is end less. But who can be the next in this list? 

It's YOU and Only You.

Yes now it's your time, to register your name in this glorious list. Have a clear vision, work hard, achieve your dreams and register yourself in the list of Great Programmers of All Time.