Being Programmers

Today's post comes from Ryan Kinal and touches on something very important to us here at Recoding: people who can't program.  Unfortunately, we have met the enemy and he is us.

A common source of frustration in the web development community is programming done by non-programmers. There is plenty of code out there written by people who have little understanding of data structures, efficiency, and architecture, and that can be frustrating to those of us who have some training in those areas. When we're hired to work with this kind of system, we wonder how the hell it could have gotten to be like that.

Why on earth would someone store all that data in plain text? Why is the login system a flat file? Why is this web service one gigantic file? Why is everything so tightly coupled? This is miserable!

The cause is, often, that the people designing and building the system just didn't have the knowledge necessary to do it well. Maybe databases were foreign to them. Perhaps they had never heard of an event-based architecture, SOLID and DRY, or even taken a class in Object Oriented Programming (or whichever programming paradigm you prefer). And even if there is knowledge of these concepts, perhaps the implementation of them is confusing or not intuitive in the current environment.

It is easy to look at this from a perspective of knowledge and experience, and say "Those people are not programmers." After all, these are fundamental concepts - essential to writing good code - and they have never even heard of them. I'll be the first to admit to thinking these kinds of things.
But here's the truth: If this kind of knowledge is essential to being a programmer, then none of us are programmers.

If we, as developers, are doing our jobs correctly and passionately, then we will always be learning. Just as Ryan from today looks back two years (or one year, or six months), and sees serious flaws in fundamental areas of architecture, design, elegance, and efficiency, Ryan two years from now will likely look at what I write today and think largely the same things. It's inevitable.

So, when you next encounter a bad piece of code, keep that in mind. Yes, it's frustrating, and I don't blame you for being frustrated. But keep in mind that it could have been a younger you writing that code, on a step to wherever you happen to be now. I would be unlikely to berate my former self, for fear of scaring myself away from the profession I sincerely enjoy.

Do the same for others.

About me

My name is Ryan, and I enjoy learning. I also enjoy teaching, though I don't think I could teach professionally. Like many others, I find that teaching promotes learning. Writing a blog post, such as my previous Object Oriented JavaScript posts, I have to think critically about the subject matter. I have to clarify it for myself before I clarify it for others, and that forces me to learn. I end up with a better understanding of the subject matter.

I've been interested in the web for a long time. I've written JavaScript for a long time, and can honestly say it is my favorite language (and I will likely write more on that subject over at Blogascript). I consider myself lucky that I have found a profession that allows me to be creative and expressive, allows me to truly own what I create, has such a great culture of teaching and learning behind it, and is considered monetarily valuable.

I'm one of three full-time web developers at McKissock Education, where I work with great people to provide professional education to those who need it. It's also where I met my partner in SlickText Text Message Marketing, my fairly-young startup.