A new year and a new reason
I was lying in bed this morning thinking about what I achieved in 2013.
- Travelled through Southeast Asia, Japan, and China.
- Walked the last 200km of the “Camino de Santiago”.
- Travelled around Ireland.
- Worked in Belfast.
- Attended the Uncle Bob's Clean Code: Agile Software Craftsmanship course.
- Meet Uncle Bob.
- Enforced Test Driven coding on myself.
- Started Gravyframe.
- Started this Blog.
This got me thinking about what I want to achieve in 2014, and where I want to take this blog. There are three reasons I started blogging. Firstly to reinforce things in my mind, secondly to help others by providing a summary of my experiences and finally to express some of my thoughts.
A few years ago I wanted to become a better programmer, and it was hard to work out what I needed to do. Code I wrote just did not seem to be right, there was something about it that I just did not like. I remember looking at open source projects and thinking, if only I could code like that.
The thing that started me off on the path to better code was the book “Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software”. I grasped the ideas but the code examples were a bit harder to understand. What I really needed was examples in C#, this is where dofactory came to the rescue. The next thing I did was by far the best thing I have ever done in terms of programming, I forked out the $79 to buy the “.NET Design Pattern Framework” download they offer. Now I could step through the code, and this helped me to understand the patterns.
Mid 2011 was the next turning point for me. I was listening to a DNR interview with Uncle Bob (first time I had heard of him) and he was talking about being a software professional. I felt that I was becoming a better programmer with all my study on programming patterns, however this interview introduced me to two ideas that I had not thoughts about before and now strive towards. The first is the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto and the second is the clean code movement.
So as for the future of this blog I want to add another reason for writing it. Fourthly I want to add in some tutorials on the concepts and tools I have come to rely on. This is a bit selfish, because like the first reason for this blog I will come to understand things more.