New Winds
Back in the 80’s
In the 80’s, there was no Internet. If you had an MSX computer and lived in Northern Finland, you were messed. There were very few games available for that Japanese piece of garbage. But the MSX computer had a pre-installed programming language console, called “MSX Basic”. And there was a monthly published programming magazine “Mikrobitti”. The magazine provided software code listings that spanned over dozens of pages. If you really manually copied all that code from the magazine into your PC you would finally have a real computer game!
Together with my brother, I would spend countless hours typing that code into the machine to get an MSX-Basic based game. The games were of course crap. But nevertheless, I was enthralled. I would keep tweaking the code to see how the changes altered the program’s behaviour. That didn’t help me learn to play soccer but maybe I learned a little bit about coding!
Change is the only constant
In software development, winds of change probably blow faster than in any other branch. It is good to be a software developer, but only if you have a constantly curious mind and you are ready to learn new things.
When the weather turns windy after a long period of relative calmness, the right way to encounter the weather change is not to be torn from the ground like an old rotten wind mill, but to rather be like a sail boat that just turns the sails and adapts itself to embrace the new current as the long-awaited empowering force!
How to stay relevant
There is no question that in software development very few things are more important than the habit of continuously learning new matters to stay relevant. The question, however, is how to maintain that mindset over time. For junior developers, the only option really is to study hard and explore how to go about it - and that is, because they have a more limited set of design patterns or implementation patterns than more experienced coders. But having matured patterns about how to keep implementing code and features at an “impressive pace” can actually be a danger in disguise -
because it’s exactly those home-grown mental patterns of solving things that can also make a seasoned developer close their eyes from new emerging technologies and paradigms - up to the point that the day comes when the change stands in front of you like a tsunami - and then it is too late!
Learning from tutorials
Luckily, there are some quite robust patterns that you can follow to keep learning, renewing your knowledge base and keeping your skillset up to date: tutorials! As this is no surprise, surprising however is how many people just keep ignoring all the available free material on the Internet that could help them learn more and more - and instead just waste their time on all that entertainment that all “toktiks” and “flixnets” (or whatever) keep force-feeding with all the power of their smart algorithms - to keep you stupid!
Learning from tutorials on a daily basis - it is possible. But it requires you to always remember that you must keep learning. Another thing to remember when learning from tutorials is to be honest to yourself and patient with results. To remember that going through a tutorial is almost useless if you just copy-paste the code from the examples into your project before attempting to run it. Instead, I recommend everybody who wants to learn from tutorials to really take the pain to manually type in everything and to try to think what the code means. Very few things are more profoundly satisfying than having implemented the examples of a tutorial correctly and you actually understand the code that you have typed!
Why I wrote this?
Today, I read from a newspaper an article that emphasized all the benefits of walking in the forest. So I went into the autumn forest and looked at everything that I saw around me. Then I started thinking about writing this blog post and when I came home, I just switched on the PC and did it.
That’s all folks this time. Enjoy your day. And also remember to have a walk in the forest sometimes! :)