Month: January 2019

The most important lesson for new programmers

Published on: 15.01.2019

On my “Sending email from Python” blog post what was cross-published on Medium I got a comment asking how to send an email via outlook programmatically.

My first reaction what that this is some troll or bot.

So I did “Let me google that for you” answer and later got “Thank you” response.

That got me thinking, maybe he was not an internet troll, maybe he just does not know how to google.

It never crosses his mind that he can ask google for the answer.

Why I was thinking that somebody was trolling me

I am an experienced (15+ years) software developer, I am experienced because I know that when I do not know something first I google it, that I search on youtube and the last resort is to ask StackOverflow.

This is what professionals do, they do not ask questions on random blogs in hope that somebody will respond.

Learn how to google

For beginners learning to code, best what you can do for yourself (and other) is to learn to google what you do not know.

Today it is easier to learn coding than 20 years ago when I was starting.

At my time the only thing that you had was a book (if you were lucky).

Today there are much more opportunities to learn:

  • you have Youtube today what is the largest free video learning tool
  • google for asking
  • and StackOverflow communities where you can ask questions

Be aware that you should not ask a question specific to your particular coding problem, just bring it to a more abstract level.

Tips on googling

From my experience, it is important to know which keywords to google.

But if you do not know keywords you can always start with “how to …..”.

Any action is better than no action.

Most programmers are financial morons

Published on: 01.01.2019

Let me start with one true story from the year 2011.

At that time I was working as a software programmer (90% C++) in a team of 5 people.

One morning, a friend from team started showing cool new source code editor called Sublime Text.

He was very happy with it, he used it on the job, for his own pet projects, and for his freelancing side jobs for almost few months.

But for him Sublime Text had one drawback, he had to pay 100$ for it (at time of this writing Sublime Text license is 80$, but I think that at that time it was 100$, but I could be wrong).

At that time I know that my friend is a financial moron.

I tried to explain to him, using same logic like in this blog post, but he just could not get it, he only understood that he has to spend money.

Why most programmers are financial morons

Let say that he was only using Sublime Text every second day (altho, knowing him it was probably every day).

With every second day assumption that is 182 day per year.

He was happy with a new tool, it was better for him, so let us say that he got 10 extra minutes of work every day.

10 minutes times 182 days is 30 hours of work more per year.

To get a break even he would need to make 3,33$ per hour of work.

Even at that time, he was charging his freelance rate at 20$ per hour and he had around 5 hours of billable work hours per week.

He is a smart guy, but he was thinking that toll is expensive.

Economically speaking, he does not know how to do a cost-benefit analysis.

It is strange how logically intelligent programmers (believe me, you do have to be logically intelligent to write computer programs) never invest in tools that basically have ROI in days.

Conclusion

Do cost benefit analysis before saying that something is expensive or cheap.

Disclaimer:
I have no interest do you use or buy Sublime Text or not, I am just using it as an example.