The Love of Programming

Jeremy Allison, of the Samba fame, has posted a piece on the advice he would give a young engineer about to embark on a software development career. Really good stuff. If I were to summarize his post in three words, it would be "love, low-level, open-source". Hmm, that's more like five words, but who counts anyway? I must confess that I am in total agreement with Jeremy, about the necessary qualities he mentions. Particularly the first one, Love.

Occasionally I run across old friends from the university whom I haven't seen for a long time, and they will get to ask me what is it that I do these days. And every time I mumble something that contains the words 'software' or 'programming', they will go 'right, I liked doing that stuff as a student, but after graduating I swore I would never go through that again'. And I will give them a sympathizing smile. I really understand their frustration. Programming is hard. And not very rewarding.

Sure, you can make a decent living and in some rare cases you may even get rich. But how many people will understand your work? Say you design a great presentation framework for web applications, like Stripes. Will your mom ever comprehend its greatness? How would you describe the wonderful effects of annotations and convention-over-configuration? You can't. You might even say that it supports the extranodal lymphoplasmacytoid lymphoma and it wouldn't have made a difference. She would still refer to you at her friends as 'plays with computers'. Lousy job description. Personally, I would prefer being referred to as 'orders other people'. That is an Executive Manager, in mom talk. Or 'gives interviews on TV'. That would be VP of Software Strategy And Stuff. But when developing software, you have no other way to endure the obscurity and the difficulty of the craft, than to grow to love it.

There is a Zen-like sense in Programming, it seems. Knowledge shall set you free. And when searching for knowledge you have to go deep. You have to go low-level. Jeremy suggests that you should get acquainted with the way the system works deep inside. Amen to that. Processors, operating systems, protocols, that sort of thing. Joel Spolsky would agree, apparently. His advice to young students is to learn C, not just high-level computer languages. Steve Yegge has a similar suggestion, to learn Math. Algorithms, probability theory, statistics, etc. My take is you need a solid background in a wide spectrum of disciplines. Don't overspecialize.

The other thing Jeremy suggests is involvement in open-source projects. I guess it should be a no-brainer today, but it was true even ten years ago. Free access on the work of esteemed peers is something rather scarce in other disciplines. But the experience you can get working with the masters is simply invaluable. Not to mention the social skills you develop, while interacting with others. After a while you can learn how to judge the probable outcome of a discussion, simply by the way the issue has been put on the table. And that way you can try to contain a fire before it burns down everything. Good social skills are a requirement for a good future manager. Communities can also help make new friends and build a reputation. Things that can pave your way to a successful career. And maybe, just maybe, you'll avoid being referred to as 'plays with computers'. Sigh.