coder . cl

As you know I work as freelance programmer, I have handled many kinds of projects, you can see the list of technologies which I am offering on my services page and some sample products which can tell of what I am capable to do on my products page. As you can see, I have left some technologies, like PHP, due to the poor budget on many of those projects and messy code that I have seen on them. Since PHP lacks some tools like static analyzers and style checkers, most PHP projects cannot ensure good quality.

As you know I was working for various medium companies along my career, until I have become a freelancer. In one of those companies, where most programming contracts were made to Informatics Engineers as Software Engineers as role. You expect at least from a Software Engineers the capacity of doing research on almost any topic related to the given programming task and a very good quality solution to the given problem. That was not the case always, as it happens on many areas, not only in software development. Today I will present a story illustrating how something what is done without interest will make you waste your time and money.

There is a myth where you do not need skilled people, because the technology that you are using is easy to handle, easy enough to avoid hiring skilled people. But that myth is not real, if you have experience, you know very well that skilled people are who drives the project to the right way. Without skilled people, probably your team will not reach the proper speed and performance to avoid falling in mistakes on any stage of the development process, even if you are using agile methodologies or not.

How many times do hear the word resource to refer to some co-worker, or even yourself in your daily routine? A resource strictly is a «source or supply from which benefit is produced». If you are called resource in your daily work, probably you do not have more value for your employer than the server where the web application that you are developing is running. If your employer calls you resource, rather than co-worker or even employee, of course he will use the Spanish Theory to get the maximum benefit from your work.

I think that my major school on computing comes from Unix & Linux. Unix and derived operating systems are really cool, they have a lot of data processing tools for the command line and software development. They come at least with one language interpreter called Awk or better suited comes with Perl, so you can easily automate system tasks. So, Unix systems are really more developer friendly, rather than user friendly operating systems. With many tools that are freely available to extend the operating system and make it fit your data processing needs, without too much licensing problems.

I see many programmers leaving their career as programmers to start a career as project managers. At certain age, they leave his work as programmers to start another stage on their career, but I think that most of them do not get bored of programming, I think that they just leave the programming career because the salary is not the same as project managers. So, along the time and reaching the higher point of a programmer salary, they decide to leave all programming activities. So, you have skilled programmers not doing good programming because their career seems to be truncated by the market driven salary.

The fact that many project managers and account managers are not able to handle milestones because many of them are not able to negotiate their schedules is real as the fact that without C — the language that Dennis Ritchie invented — we cannot have almost anything about the computer technologies that we know today. You as developer must assume that you should be leaded by people that is able to manage the schedule without falling in the need to use overtime and similar stuff, among including more developers into the project and requiring more resources.