In The Mask of Zorro Diego de la Vega puts Alejandro Murrieta through his paces. At long last Alejandro Murrieta completes the parry flawlessly. Before he can enjoy his success Diego de la Vega says one word, “Again!”
Repetition, repetition and repetition! Getting something right for the first time usually means that I remembered the steps of the process for the first time. The process becomes ingrained by repetition. To repeat a process is to perfect the process.
In my attempts to becoming a developer, the first thing I did was read a book. Learn C# in 24 Hours seemed a good choice. I thought reading would help me to develop applications. Sadly it did not. 90% of what I read was lost on me. Only now do I understand what they were talking about. One of the roadblocks was that I knew how to create web pages but I did not know the technical jargon. Speaking of aggregates and arguments only made me feel like begging them to speak English.
Guidance for junior developers is invaluable. Being left to one’s own devices is like being a classroom without a teacher for a year. The chances of passing the exams at the end of the year are slim if a syllabus was not followed. After a year of pointlessly suffering through allocated work I went into the design aspect of applications solely because I was better at it than at development.
A few years along the line I was bored out of my mind. A chance came my way to get back on the development wagon. At first I was not very excited about the prospect of developing again (keeping in mind the torture of not getting it right the first time), but my fears soon abated. A new manager, better understanding of how to allocate work and a better judge of proficiency made my second venture into the developers’ domain a pleasant experience.
Keep it simple stupid! (KISS) The acronym was first coined by Kelly Johnson and is still relevant as ever. I started out with Manage and Add/Edit screens. These were the least complicated parts of most applications, yet they contained a little bit of everything. Controls, data sources, classes, methods and stored procedures, each of these were a bit more difficult than the previous one. The next step was to start writing my own stored procedures. It took approximately eight hours of development time per page. After a month or two, the time was reduced to approximately four hours – not exclusively due to commitment, but rather to working smarter and not harder.
As I became more confident, the work became more complicated. For every four modules a more difficult module was assigned. Want to learn SQL? Try writing reports. In six months' time I went from knowing how to select a list of items from a database table to writing complex and dynamic queries that even I'm surprised at.
The last part of the success secret was a ‘work buddy’ who was assigned to me. My work buddy helps out at the stages where my progress was brought to a grinding halt due to inexperience.
For more information visit the QBCon home page.
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