I saw sindhu’s post on “Real programmers”, and it made me think and want to write something until the library opens in fifteen minutes, when I leave.
Till today, I’ve seen one programmer who I respect beyond anyone else. He was around 25 or 26. He used to have two or three terminal windows open on a 30 inch monitor, wrote code with vim with barely any syntax highlighting. He was always ready to help you, would listen to your problem, no matter how busy he was. At the end of my internship, my project came to around 5000 lines of code. It was large, and didn’t do too much, and was rather hard to write. I was proud and asked him how much code he usually writes.
In one quarter, he wrote 36000 lines of code. 36000.
That put productivity in perspective for me. There is only so much tools can do for you. At the end of the day, the real professionals work with what they have, and that’s usually very little and do wonders with it.
The greatest programmers, the greatest leaders of open-source who’ve contributed more to the community than most people contribute to the companies that pay them. None of them seek any kind of credit, any kind of extra recognition. Heck, most people don’t even have a website.
I feel productivity is a farce. I define productivity like this: tasks that need to be automated, and can be automated. For example, you can’t automate the code one writes, but you can use an editor that indents the code, because that can be automated, and is required quite frequently.
Do not interpret this thinking that I’m only interested in you if you write behemoth amounts of source? Do I think that me or the kind of people I mentioned here are better than everyone? No.
The lifehacker generation will continue to live on with their little “productivity tools”, while the real heroes do magic with an 80×25 terminal.
In one line: I respect people who do more than they talk about doing.
You just explained “Talk is cheap, show me the code”.
In a way, yes.
What I was originally aiming at was to say productivity is an oft-thrown around term.
I really need to learn how to write.
Small is beautiful..
This post might be a bit old, Anirudh, popped across this through a shared entry in my feed reader.
My take on this is this – even though ‘talk is cheap’ and need to ’show the code’, the talk can be of much use, and there is a thing called productivity. That ofcourse, gets us into a fix of getting our advices from proper places.
Just to illustrate, I do not consider myself a ‘uber coder’. But I was a vi dwelling *nix coder. My cousin, about half a year back, talked me into using a IDE (doesn’t matter what she asked me to use). I listened to her, because she was my mentor a decade back when I was seeking professional education. I did find that it was helpful. My team too were like minded like me and with some benchmarking (showing the code
) I have been able to help them transition.
To come to point – do talk about it. But listen to it, when you ‘know’ the source.