Gadgetopia

I agree that I love to learn new things. However, I'm much more motivated to learn stuff that I know will help me out right now. For instance, I know that regular expressions are powerfull and can be easy to use. I just don't really know how to use them very well. So, if I'm working on something that I know will be difficult to do through normal code, but simpler through regular expressions, I'll take the time to learn the regex.

I think that's a win-win case. Because, I've learned something new and provided a better product because of it. And, next time, I won't have to learn it again, so, development will be a lot faster.

Instead of learning "new" stuff, learn about how well you're doing your current stuff... measure and reflect on what kinds of defects you put into your code (they don't creep in by themselves, even though we call them bugs), and how you might detect and correct defects more quickly, or prevent them.

" Instead of learning 'new' stuff, learn about how well you're doing your current stuff..."

I agree with this. If you put time into mastering an older platform rather than learning 20 new ones, you would be a much more effective developer.

I think back to Movable Type. Probably the most successful blogging app around -- written in Perl/CGI.

I think this post is pure wisdom. The Dorothy Parker quote that graced the header, but now seems to have disappeared, is also quite brilliant. What was it? I think it was: "Curiosity is the cure for boredom. No one has found the cure for curiosity."

For a long time, I thought of curiosity only as a good thing and I took pride in it. But this was self-delusion. Follow-through and the ability to tolerate boredom are crucial to success in any endeavor. "Curiosity" can be a good name to hide bad things -- self-indulgence, a childish demand to be constantly entertained, a kind of gluttony for intellectual amusements. Binge/purge cycles on blog-reading, anyone?

I suppose certain virtues & vices are just the flip sides of each other. A detail focus and an appetite for puzzles, which make for a good technician, often entail a compulsive and overly fixated quality of attention, which makes those same people blind to the big picture and less capable of avoiding detours and sticking to longterm goals.

Geeks are a bit like terriers. They're bred to chase things down through tiny little tunnels. They're a bit neurotic.

For me this appetite to learn new things come from a very realistic place. When I started programming in C++, I didn't really want to learn more new stuff. My first personal project was writing a game called Dr Mario. I programmed that for a few months, until in my programming class I learned about something called "classes". Whoa! I went back and rewrote what I had written using classes, and let me tell you - it made a whole lot more sense. I can't begin to tell you the times I put a lot of thought into writing something myself - only to find out someone else had written a free, much more stable version. Now I always search for a program/library that does what I'm trying to do before I write it myself. And it has really saved me quite a bit of time.

That being said, I like to read blogs to read about neat new libraries and programs. However, I don't feel the need to really get into how those neat programs work - I have more important things to do. But I do think it's very beneficial to know what's out there!

Overall I do agree with your point though - don't dive into things you don't have an immediate use for.

Very interesting read, and entertaining (in geekish ways). I'd rather get something done personally than try to make the code more perfect. Next time I just want to get something done, already I know how to make it a little better, instinctively. I suppose there's a phase in every programmer's life where elegance is more important than anything else. For me it was with Java and I got carried away in ultra-elegant class-files. After one week I noticed the game I wrote could do about 1% of something I could hack together in some Basic flavor, and it started to become hard to manage. Actually, I still like to look at the source, but it reminded me more than anything that the result counts, and not the code.

However, I'm also a big fan of manageable code. Especially these days where I'm working on a site with over 50,000 pages. Everything that's a little weird and workaround-like (legacy code) takes like several days longer to update or make a simple change. Impressively unflexible. Bad code also reminds us we need to be careful.

About new technologies, well, it helps to read up on the latest buzzwords -- even if it just makes you decide you don't have to get into it yet, or you give it some more years. You might even wait until the first actual application is out before you try yourself. Wait till it's stable. Keep it in the back of your head. Go on with what works.

For me, what works is something like PHP at the moment. Certainly not the most elegant language (and I also program many others), but definitely great user-base (=many code samples) and a huge core-library. And then connect this simple thing which works to something grand, like the Google Web API... a lot of interesting stuff to be done with that! Well, more at my Google Blogoscoped... http://blog.outer-court.com ... I'm getting carried away...

I would say u full of bullshit. Once was said that nobodys gonna buy watch a box which today is know to be a TV. So shut up with your stupid $hit. There will be apps and they'll build the best websites ever been.