General Programming Advice
People are good at what they do most frequently. It is called experience. Experience cannot be faked, but the beautiful part is, it can be transferred. It is mainly gained by learning from mistakes. However, if you are a person who can accept advice from others, it is worth checking out this article. If this is not the case, I advise you to check it out either way. You see the irony, right?
The point is that it is always a good idea to listen to people to learn from them. There is an excellent saying about this topic. It states that it is a good idea always to assume that the person you are talking to knows something that you do not know. This is what I call the “Art of Listening”. We can paraphrase this quote to our advantage. Programmer is always worth listening carefully. Moreover, a programming advice is always worth considering.
Introduction
This is the beginning of the series called “Programming Advice”. I decided to call them a series because I personally put my experience into the articles. I purely talk out of personal experience. I see those as projections of my career’s episodes, hence the name.
In the following paragraphs, I will introduce you to a situation and then discuss the main point. This way, the programming advice will be much more visual and, therefore, easy to understand.
The Programming Advice #1
This is about taking notes. Most people who read this will already know the benefits of note-taking. However, I want to state the importance of it with a real-life example from my experience.
Once upon a time, a bug needed to be fixed. As a classic approach, I studied the task and requirements, found the related code, and started digging in. I found a code that could help with the task during the process. I had two choices, either solve the issue immediately or do it later. I chose to do it later. Even though completing the task took about twenty minutes, I forgot about that little code fix. I did not hear about the task for a month. One day, as usual, I started to work and saw another ticket similar to the abovementioned task. Again, I started digging in to see the actual cause. It turned out to be the code that I had forgotten that day.
Furthermore, the most painful part is that it took much longer to find the cause than to fix it. Karma worked against me. Though this situation was not entirely up to me, I could take a note to return to that. Alternatively, I could fix it right away. However, I decided to procrastinate, and this is what happened.
The moral of the story is to take notes. Especially if you know that it is something you are going to be procrastinating.