9 What Next?

I’m glad you’ve followed along and I hope you enjoyed this brief text. In parting, I want to make an effort to direct you toward worthwhile resources and helpful philosophies.

Writing code is one thing. Writing good code is another thing entirely. I’ve heard of developers being gauged by their line counts per week. In one instance, the story goes, a senior developer was appalled by the move and spent the first week refactoring existing code. The story goes on, he solved all the bugs while making a contribution of negative lines of code. The code base was smaller after he improved it, not bigger.

Programming, writing code, developing software, whatever you want to call it, may someday be like literacy is today. There was a day when almost no one could read and write. Now a lot of people can. The same drastic change may happen with computer literacy in the future.

Computer science can be called a field in its own right, but it’s the overlap of computer science and other fields that excites me the most. This is a tool that can make tools! If you pursue a totally unrelated field, you’ll probably find ways to use your computer skills.

A book like this is written to stay relevant for years. Some texts will be relevant for decades and some for centuries and even millenia. Knowledge of algorithms and mathematics will future-proof you. There’s a balance to things. If you only focused on mathematics, well you probably wouldn’t be reading this introductory programming text! Diversify your portfolio! Make it a habit to get out of your technical comfort zone and explore new technologies every once in a while.

By the way, you don’t have to pick a programming language. Read a Python book too! Sometimes Python has a tool out of the box that makes it a better choice to use.

You’ll hear talk of not reinventing the wheel, or not repeating yourself. Building something from scratch can be enlightening. The key is in having discretion. Use the appropriate tools for serious applications, but try to make your own for the sake of fun and learning too.

When you have a problem, someone else may have already solved it and provided code that solves the problem. You can review their code to understand the solution, or just use their solution. Either way, you’re probably better off being able to take a peek and understand a bit about the code that you run.

If you keep on this path, you might be solving problems before anybody else. Give back to the community and share your solutions. It’ll lead to professional opportunities and you can empower people in the same way other open source contributors have empowered you.

If you spotted an error, have any questions or commentary, or you just want to say “hi,” I can be reached at bryanhoffman1@gmail.com