I’m a programming passionate. Only that. Not a professional, not a guru, only one dev trying to learn more and more each day.
Why?
I don’t remember a time when I have no access to a computer, even the earliest memories I can recall contain computers. An Intel 486?
I have to thank all this stuff to my parents, I’m aware I was (And I’m) very lucky.
My childhood can be summarized in five points: Need For Speed III, Duke Nukem 3D, Age Of Empires, Sim City 3000, and Starcraft. I have never been a social guy, that
kind of person who is full of friends, and everybody knows and respects. Since the begginning I have felt that loneliness could be a synonym of calm, instead of sadness. Well,
thats a matter of each one, depends on each one experiences and feelings.
The fact is that I was cappable of spending many ours on the computer, mostly playing videogames, since nothing in the external (real) world was specially interesting. Thats even more true
during school and high-school. There were a couple of true friends during that periods, but thats all. Reading was a good ally too, and still is.
But sociality and friendship was not the problem, the problem was the so common and eternal feeling of “What the fuck I’m supposed to do here?” The point there was that I have no idea of what is the thing that identifies me, whats the thing I’m supposed to do better than the average person. Some people play soccer, others form a rock band, whoever knows. Wasn’t until the final years of high school I realized that programming could be the answer.
I started programming during a software course the (last?) year on the high school, such common course teaching Microsoft Word, Powerpoint, etc. But there was one interesting subject at the end of the year: Programming. Programming! “So this is how that programs are made? So cool!” This was my first reaction to Visual Basic 6. Please don’t leave this page after reading that, have some hope on me, ok? Yep, Visual Basic 6. But the thing worked, and I cannot stop programming! First was VB6, then VB.NET, later C#, and since three years full time C++. I really like it!
So… programming
Programming includes some interesting fields: Algorithms, hardware design, operative systems, programming languages… The so called Computer Science. Each one of these fields should be known and understood correctly, not
foccusing your interest only in one of them and rejecting the rest.
This practice could generate some bias in your way to measure and see things when doing software engineering, and in fact some kind of this bias is so pretty common on
the software engineering community.
People claiming at the benefits and advantages of Object Oriented Programming, the answer to all the questions on programming; people spending thousands of hours figuring out how cool the Big O notation is without realizing how the hardware (That thing where your programs are run) works, etc. In my case, being frankly, I could be a bit biased with something in the way of “hardware and programming are what matters, stop doing all that math” . At least be aware of your situation.
I’m not going to provide a full list of best practices for Software Engineering here (I’m not the right person for that, I think), nor throwing you two hundreds of facts and rules about good C++ programming (refer to the portfolio and the blog for that). What I want to do here is to encourage learning: Please always stay tuned at the changes of the world and the community, be aware of the state-of-the-art of your preferred tools. Evolve. Don’t get stuck on ideas and feelings that have become invalid even before I was born. Its hard, I know. But try to accomplish this.
This web is only a site where compile all my research on that challenge, all my thoughts, experiments, projects, whatever related to programming I do to be sure I’m always right or at least on the right way. And of course if that’s not the case, please notice me!
The challenge for a good looking site
I’m not a web developer, I have little experience in web development. This site was built after two weeks of me forking jekyll themes and touching sass files in a random way.
I’m mostly happy with the results, but I know it could be improved. I’m a C++ guy, note that those HTML and CSS files are for me like what the libstdc++ sources do to the mental health of a C++ newbbie still fighting with std::cin and std::cout.
Focus your attention in the content, instead of the container. Oh, seems like I have learned some HTML jargon!