My Secret Life as a Spaghetti Coder
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Seriously, be a purple cow.
Not [the] best cow or most milk-giving cow or prettiest cow. A purple cow would stand out in a crowd of best, most milk-giving, and prettiest cows. [Indeed,] It would be the purple one that you would talk about if you saw that group.
-Chad Fowler in My Job Went To India, with the idea from Seth Godin (whose book is linked in the quote)
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Linus Torvalds, Yukihiro Matsumoto, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Larry Wall. They're all famous software developers you may have heard of. If you haven't heard of them, surely you know about some of their creations: Linux, Ruby, Rails, and Perl.

Checking the Rails core alumni list, I had heard of half of them before I knew they were ever Rails team members. You know other names as well - many inside what you might consider your core community, and probably several outside of it.

Even if these developers weren't trying to do so, they did a fantastic job of marketing themselves. As Chad Fowler notes in this week's chapter of MJWTI,
Anyone can write Struts or Nant on their résumé. Very few can write Struts committer or Nant committer.
When thinking about marketing yourself as a programmer, keep that in mind. In other words, it's not just about the fame from a hugely successful project you started, or the love from all the sexy kittens who know your name. More...


I don't like to have too many microposts on this blog, so I've decided to save them up and start a Programming Quotables series. The idea is that I'll post quotes about programming that have one or more of the following attributes:
  1. I find funny
  2. I find asinine
  3. I find insightfully true
  4. And stand on their own, with little to no comment needed
Here's the seventh in that series. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did: More...


The internet has given us an amazing opportunity to "build [our] brands," as Chad Fowler points out in this week's short chapter from My Job Went To India.

There are two aspects to consider when building your personal brand: recognition and respect. Chad uses the swastika as the prime example of branding for awareness without positive association: almost everyone in the western world would think of Nazis when they see it (recognition), even if they have no respect for it. More...


Just two years ago, I was beyond skeptical towards the forces telling me that comments are worse-than-useless, self-injuring blocks of unexecutable text in a program. I thought the idea was downright ludicrous. But as I've made an effort towards reaching this nirvana called "self-documenting code," I've noticed it's far more than a pipe dream.

The first thing you have to do is throw out this notion of gratuitously commenting for the sake of commenting that they teach you in school. There's no reason every line needs to be commented with some text that simply reiterates what the line does.

After that, we can examine some seemingly rational excuses people often use to comment their code: More...


Is there a perfect way to teach programming to would-be programmers? Let's ask the Magic 8-Ball. More...


If you get too smart, you start to think a lot. And when you think a lot, your mind explores the depths of some scary places. If you're not careful, your head could explode. More...



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