How to become a better programmer

[AB12358]

"Answering my own question: compilers, operating systems, and network programming. Not SICP, FP, OOP, or monads."

If your question had been about better intellectual masturbation techniques, however...



I think an understanding of why relational databases are designed and implemented the way they are is quite useful, too.

[Jurassic]

I picked a top universities website, worked out what the core CS modules were, and the read the first text of each.

[EspressoLover]

Honestly, the answer to this question may just be go work for Google for a year.



Finance as a whole has some pretty horrendous habits, beliefs and practices when it comes to the discipline of software engineering. Personally I blame the tendency of our industry to always be fighting fires. A lot of shoddy hacks get rushed out, merged into git-master, then completely forgotten about until the brittle code fails in prod spectacularly six months down the line. Devs play second-fiddle to "front-office", who are always pushing for new revenue-generating feature. So code rarely gets refactored or cleaned up



Another issue is that products requirements are often vague and underspecified. The PMs don't know exactly what they need until the researchers run the analytics. But the researchers can't run analytics until the framework gets built. But the framework can't built until the PM can outline to the devs what's needed.



For all its warts, Silicon Valley does tends to be ahead of the curve in this area.



EDIT: s/SV/Silicon Valley/

[katastrofa]

Yeah, Google is a fantastic work environment for software developers. But if you go there for 1 year, half of this time will be spent learning the ropes. Two years is more likely to teach you something.

[Jurassic]

@EspressLover Whats SV?