coder . cl

Finding good programmers or programmers above the average is a little bit hard. Most programming schools are only doing a review on the two main branches of programming paradigms, using the most frequently used branch called imperative programming which is mainly focused in object oriented programming. Is that enough?, I am not finding guilty and I am not interested on that subject, because I have learnt functional programming and procedural programming mainly using books, both technical and theoretical, among other stuff like reading code — mainly learning from FOSS projects and its source code. My interests have been saving me for years as developer, because I am always improving my skills and there is always something new to learn about.

This seems to be a huge discussion. There have been a long time companies trying to create the ultimate programming language that can be used by almost anyone, with many fails thought. The closest attempt to success, is just to keep people more interested on how to make better applications and make them to try other programming languages harder to write, also keep their interested in more complex topics. Seems that there are two forces, one trying to keep people interested in deep knowledge about programming with a good theoretical background and other one to keep people ignorant, just trying to make their life easier, but not at all, mainly once they face complex problems.

Typing is not a problem. We have many programming languages which are using dynamic typing. Dynamic typing is not so good as you can think. It allows you to do much stuff, where you can evaluate some expressions like (int)"1" + 1 = 2, without type errors. The problem with that kind of flexibility is the fact that there is no standard on boolean evaluations, leading to logic errors, and obviously to program failures. Even in some type-safe programming languages, they allow some stuff like that, there is C++98 and further versions allowing a wide variety of type casts, where any mistake on the casted values can generate logic errors and failures.

As you know I was first a system programmer. I have started developing in Asm, C and C++. Then, on the early ages of my career as programmer, I started a position as Web Developer using the Perl language. Those times were not Flash, not much JavaScript on the client side, among other new cool technologies, and almost all sites were developed using HTML 3. In parallel I was learning Lisp and Scheme, so my functional programming background was not deep, but enough to understand some cool Perl features. As many Perl programmers those times, I got lost in PHP developments for many years.

How many times did you have been pressured because you need to reach a milestone quickly?. I think that most programmers have suffered similar situations where you must use overtime to meet a milestone or similar stuff. So, I can guess some facts about your situation, the first one is about money, you are not receiving the complete payment of your working hours. The second one is the fact that you are suffering pressure and being affected by quick milestones on more than one project per year. The third one is the fact that usually you are not able to complete your tasks in the estimated time. And the latest fact, is about how bored are you with your current job position.

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.