Comments on: Baselines

By: James

James — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 19:18:04 +0000

Nice post. Thanks.

I do keep my old code, but I rarely look at it. This is a good idea I’ll start doing it.

I do try and benchmark my self. I will do various coding exercises and look at the interview process for big companies. I also look at websites like the one below and see how I compare. Through the years I have “leveled up”, but as expected my advancement is slowing down as I get more specialized.

http://www.indiangeek.net/programmer-competency-matrix/

By: Alastair McDermott

Alastair McDermott — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 12:05:56 +0000

I noticed your mention of base-lining in that discussion, was wondering if you actually did that yourself 🙂

I don’t code all that much myself these days so I reckon I’m probably on a down curve (or at best seeing a significant reduction in the rate of improvement). I need to get stuck in a bit to keep my head in.

Looking back at my code from college, what’s most interesting to me is the world of difference between what I wrote in 3rd year, and what I wrote in 4th year after working for a software house for 12 months. The code isn’t necessarily more advanced – I worked in 360/390 ASM for the 12 months, which wasn’t on our course – but the primary difference is the defensive coding and documentation. Designed for robustness and maintenance.

I’d be interested to know what the nature of the code improvements are that most people get from their first couple of years in industry – is it totally dependent on the company, or the language/environment? Or something else?

By: Nicolas Viennot

Nicolas Viennot — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 23:46:31 +0000

I keep all my code from my teenage years for that reason. Just to laugh at my past self.

That PIC assembly brought some memories back. I used to do some PIC programming as well… in assembly (http://viennot.biz/remote_car.pdf / page 33). It’s only later that I discovered what was a C compiler.

Turns out, what most of us need to get rid of comments is to create our own DSLs, but that’s hard. What’s even worse is that most of the time, trying to get there is pure intellectual masturbation.

By: paul

paul — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 23:30:11 +0000

I doubt that my code is really getting better; I don’t think I care much. If my code is already good enough, I’d value productivity improvements and increases in the range of problems that I can solve, over making the code itself a little bit better. When I was a less experienced programmer (but not a beginner) I sweated a lot about code quality, sometimes implementing stuff multiple times to get the interfaces and style just right. Now that I have more experience I can usually come up with something reasonable on the first try, and move on to the next task, rather than spend a lot of time trying to improve the reasonable into the perfect.

I do remember some code I wrote in college, that took me a day or so to write, for a particular task; recently, I faced the same task again, but I didn’t have the old code, so I wrote a new solution and it took less than an hour. In that way I’m clearly getting better, whether or not the new code is itself better than the old code.

By: Conor

Conor — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 19:25:17 +0000

Occasionally, but in some cases it’s been so long that either the language has change a *lot* (PHP) or it’s been so long since I’ve coded in the language that I can’t properly understand it any more (C++).

I still have most of my code from college though, I’m a terrible packrat when it comes to code.