Speaker: I thought I would try to help some of you get a jump-start on you career, with sharing grants, top ten tips for young programmers. You know grant is Gigi, because his signature is in binary; 1s and 0s, the bottom of his email.
So he has got ten very short tips, but useful, specifically if you are a young programmer. I suppose young programmer could be defined less by age, and just more by experience.
1. Read. If you do not like spending a lot of time reading, you should not program. When you are learning a computer language, you must be willing to spend hours reading books, websites, magazine articles, etcetera.
2. Take your time finding the language that is right for you. Think about what you want to do when programming a computer. Remember, once you learn a computer language, it's easy to learn another. I say the same thing about foreign languages.
3. When you start to make a program, really spend some time on what you want it to do. I cannot tell you how many times I have just started a project and then realized, it was useless.
4. Use flowcharts. Flowcharting allows you to organize your code and make it efficient. It's very true. This is where information architecture really can come in handy, because not only -- yeah, let's say you have got something that you want the user to do, but if you haven't worked out how that's going to happen and then worse yet, its implemented in a way that the user is never going to be able to figure out. Well, that's just failure. Flowcharting can help you define that process if the platform isn't already built with some of that flow in mind.
5. Back everything up. When you start to program, there is a good chance that you might mess something up in for your computer. Give yourself a safety net and back everything up.
6. When you have made some significant progress -- and by the way, that is so true. It sounds so weird, but I know of plenty of programs that have just died because the developer lost the code. For years the phoenity, icons, not programs, its, media but phoenity -- that's how I have always said it, phoenity.com. Maybe I shouldn't say that out loud unless I can confirm that. Maybe one of the people in the chat room can. He did these icons that I just loved, but then he lost all the original sources and didn't even upload them to the web. I was like oh, you are killing me, man. So backup is important. Number six, when you have made them significant progress in your program, save it, it never hurts anyone, just save things. This may tie into using something like SBN, not just for code checking, but logging, and then back up as well.
7. Comment your code. If you leave a project and later come back to it, you would have probably forgotten how it worked, commenting your code will help you. With comments, you do not have to read through the whole thing, instead you can look at your comments and get an idea of what's going on. True. I will tell you, commenting is so important, so important. Generic comments don't do you any good, they don't do anybody else any good. Commenting is crucial, it's crucial to good development, because I will tell you, I have worked with developers, didn't comment, and you know what, their code worked for the time being, but then as soon as you need to make any changes, it was useless, because they made shortcuts, or they took shortcuts I should say.
8. Don't be afraid to ask for help. Microsoft is a great website and database for programmers. Also check out their blog and ask questions, there is always someone who is willing to help. Of course, it goes beyond just Microsoft, you could develop on OS X, you could develop on Linux, you could develop anywhere, really, as long as you have found a good development environment, you are set.
9. This goes back to my first point, get a book. Your local school or library will most likely have books on programing, check them out and learn from them, and you would be surprised. I mean, you would say, well, why would I want to learn a language that really no one is using anymore? When I was in college they were still teaching Cobal and Fortran, because a lot of enterprise applications were still relying on those languages. They are maybe not as modern as some other languages are, but there are still applications programmed in those languages, so it's important for you to stay up to speed on as much as you possibly can, and want to; it never hurts to learn more.
10. When you start to make programs, let other people try them out. You would ask people to evaluate them, or you could give them out as free ware. Start a website and let people download them if you want, that's true.
Transcription by:
Scribe4you Transcription Services