Programming is a very creative job. A good programmer means - who creating some new logic for a specific task and creating something better than the previous one in the development process. It's not the most difficult thing to learn a new programming language or tools, but, to understand and embrace the programming mindset.
In the real world developer's comes in all sizes and shapes, but they share one core common thing - they all think like programmers. They bring their approach to everything in their lives, whether it is a challenging software problem, or hacking or other aspects of their lives.
Cultivating and developing this mindset is a crucial element to become a good programmer. This mindset can help you to succeed in your career. So, what defines this programming mindset? Let's find them -
1. Learn by doing and not stop until the job is done
Having a learner's mindset is one of the greatest assets you can have in your programming career. The very first talent of a good programmer is cultivating their mind to be calm and never give up until it's done.
When you start coding, you may find lots of difficulties. Even, after hours of coding one missing semi-colon or one misses-capitalized word can break your entire program. If the program doesn't execute, don't give up. Break your problem into the smallest steps possible and go through your script line by line to the root of the bug.
2. Love the pain or at least, not fight for it
Sometime in real life and development process, all things are totally SUCK. The sucky things we all have to deal with and work through. The best thing we can do for ourselves is to try our best and reframe how we think.
3. A willingness to experiment
The experiment is the best part of learning. Experiment with concepts you don’t quite understand. When you encounter these concepts in programming, write some code to improve your understanding. Write code that expand your boundary. As long as you don’t do, you will be fine. And even if you do, you learn something new.
4. Reading and understanding code
You need to learn, how to read and understand code. Cause most of the code that you'll be using in development process are going to be open source. If you download someone’s code and it doesn’t work, don’t expect anyone else to fix the problem. You’ll have to jump in and fix it yourself. This will also help you to learn new techniques in coding.
5. Problem solving attitude
Last and most important to learn how to solve problems in a logical, coordinated fashion. There are different kind of problem solving methods, such as divide-and-conquer, technique of solving a similar, but easier problem, small-chunking, and so on. If you’re stuck, read the error and related documentation. Then search for information online and asked in forums for programmer.
Conclusion
Ready to start thinking like a programmer? This geek story may give you a glance of a programmer's mind and help you to setup a road map of your programming career. Thank you!
