Max Kanat-Alexander

Code Simplicity: The science of software design

Learn to be a better programmer by taking charge of your interests

If you want to be a better programmer, a good first step would be to choose an area of software development to take additional responsibility for. Now, when we say “responsibility,” we don’t mean the sort of “you’re to blame and you accept it” responsibility that is so commonly thought of. Instead, we mean the willingness to take charge or the willingness to do something about an area.

So select out some area of software development, and decide to be a bit more responsible for it than one was before. The “area” could be simply some additional part of the current project you work on, the whole project itself, some type of software development that you haven’t done before, some aspect of software development you’d like to know more about, etc. If you’re feeling adventurous, try deciding that you’re personally responsible for the quality of the entire software project you’re working on. If you do, you may be surprised at how much easier this makes your life. When you’re trying to maintain the quality of only a piece of a software project, it’s very difficult. You’re surrounded by complexity or confusion, and you have to fend it off at every turn. But when you look at the project as a whole instead and try to decide what should be done with it as a whole, the solution presents itself much more readily. Now, it may seem like quite a bit more work to resolve the problems of the whole project, and it is. But it’s considerably more satisfying, tremendously more effective, and will bring you up to seniority as a software developer much more quickly than just trying to solve the problems of your one particular area.

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