

How to be a Programmer: A Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary - t0pj
http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html

======
nadim
Wtf: "Since I have children, I try to spend evenings with them sometimes. The
rhythm that works best for me is to work a very long day, sleep in the office
or near the office (I have a long commute from home to work) then go home
early enough the next day to spend time with my children before they go to
bed. I am not comfortable with this, but it is the best compromise I have been
able to work out. Go home if you have a contagious disease. You should go home
if you are thinking suicidal thoughts. You should take a break or go home if
you think homicidal thoughts for more than a few seconds. You should send
someone home if they show serious mental malfunctioning or signs of mental
illness beyond mild depression. If you are tempted to be dishonest or
deceptive in a way that you normally are not due to fatigue, you should take a
break. Don't use cocaine or amphetamines to combat fatigue. Don't abuse
caffeine."

~~~
trickjarrett
Some programmers I knew in college could have used this paragraph. It seems
crazy and out there, but it reaches a very small sect of the programmer
community.

------
trickjarrett
I and some coworkers plan to wikify this and update it with more of a web
development spin on it. It's a truly astounding document, with lots of good
information relevant for programmers.

~~~
t0pj
You're gonna share this wiki with the rest of us when it's up and running,
right? ;)

~~~
trickjarrett
but of course, what kind of hacker would I be if I didn't?

~~~
trickjarrett
<http://www.trickjarrett.com/programmer/>

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jimbokun
Not going to read it right now, but that is a truly impressive Table of
Contents. The relatively few number of entries that involve sitting with hands
on keyboard and code editor open accurately reflects the distribution of
skills required to be a good programmer.

~~~
JesseAldridge
"Not going to read it right now"

I said the same thing when I first found this a couple of years ago. Any day
now...

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sciolizer
Haha. He gives a practical use for divination:

"The multitude of available divination techniques are very useful for
determining your own semi-conscious desires, as they each present a complete
ambiguous and random pattern that your own subconscious will assign meaning
to."

It reminds me of Douglas Adams' speech, "Is there an artificial God?"

"Apparently, we need to think about the building being inhabited by dragons
and look at it in terms of how a dragon would move around it... This sounds
like complete and utter nonsense, because anything involving dragons must be
nonsense... Nevertheless... it may be there is something interesting going
on... You figure out how the dragon's going to be happy here and lo and
behold! you've suddenly got a place that makes sense for other organic
creatures, such as ourselves, to live in."

<http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams/>

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mleonhard
"It is an odd fact that is not reflected in salaries that a good programmer is
more productive than 10 bad programmers. This creates a strange situation. It
will often be true that you could move faster if your weak programmers would
just get out of the way. If you did this you would in fact make more progress
in the short term. However, your tribe would lose some important benefits,
namely the training of the weaker members, the spreading of tribal knowledge,
and the ability to recover from the loss of the strong members. The strong
must be gentle in this regard and consider the issue from all angles."

This makes a lot of sense to me.

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tristmegistus
I read it a few years ago when I was a rookie programmer. It gave me a more
accurate picture of the job than I had held previously.

~~~
breck
" It gave me a more accurate picture of the job than I had held previously."

Wouldn't it be hilarious if that was one of the reviews on the backcover of a
book?

~~~
marcus
The last time I saw that sentiment in a book review it was on a Dilbert book.

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mikkom
Comprehensive? Maybe.

Short? No way.

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breck
Can anyone shed some light on who the author is?

~~~
jmatt
I thought the same thing. Who is this guy and why haven't I heard of him
before.

My initial research...

Started with his email read@hire.com. From there I went to hire.com which
forwards on to Authoria. Apparently Authoria bought Hire.com in 2005.

After a little bit of googling I found an article that was published on him
shortly after his orignal "how to be a programmer" article was published.

[http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-
bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl...](http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-
bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl?path=/articles/2003/02/07/1044579937623.html)

Robert Read, 37, of Austin, Texas, is a principal engineer at Hire.com. Before
that he founded 4R Technology, which made a scanner-based image analysis
quality control tool for the paper industry.

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smeade
Short?

~~~
pfedor
Well it's only a hundred pages. Short for a book.

