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On Becoming a Better Programmer A How-to Guide!

Published Feb 11, 2019

Become a Paradigm polygot

In a fast paced industry mere knowledge of programming languages using Object Oriented Programming or Functional Programming isn’t just sufficient. A combination thereof is very much a requim if not a catalyst for alternative or out of the box thinking to solving problems with Programming languages.

Some exercises worth undertaking:

• Try Solving 99 prolog problems
• use Tool.golang.org to learn GO!
• Dan grossman’s Programming language course is an interesting resource well worth anyone & everyone’s time (For an Industry veteran or newbie in the software services industry).
• For Functional Programming 
  • Real world oCaml by Yaron minsky
  • Domain Modelling Made Functional

Become a Database polygot

There’s RDBMS. There are NoSQL Databases. We all know this. Getting a grip on more than one Database solution is a key to cracking a career in Data Science or Software Services. There are all sorts of variants to NoSQL :-

• DynamoDB,
• bigtable,
• redis,
• spanner(developed at google for disturbed transcational use-targeted at enterprises),
• Neo4j& memSQL(An in memory DB in growing popularity, used by Uber, AKAMAI etc)

Some Interesting Books worth Purchasing:

• Dmitri Fontaine’s Mastering postgesSQL
• Baron shwartz High performance MySQL
• Dynamodbguide.com has an interesting getting started guide on NoSQL DBs using Amazon’s AWS as a primary example.

Become Protocol polygot TCP/IP, HTTP,UDP,FTP

Must know : SSL,TLS,Applayer Intergrations sockets and ports

• High performance browser networkingRead up RFC 7231 (about 90 pages) first instead of RFC2616(more recent but way too long)
  • (As a general tip find and read RFCs with the most citations on Google search results).
• Most cited RFC have certain additional resources(or perspectives) to further lookup and explore.(**Lookup most used RFC (or) most cited)

Proficiency with build tooling, packaging and distribution

• Being able to tweak the tools,build/change whats needed
• Maven,python packaging
• MSBUILD, nuget;
• system.IO.Packaging,
• Dependency Injection tools/frameworks such as
  • Castle Windsor 
  • Simple injector 
  • Microsoft.Extensions.Dependency injection 
  • Autofac DI containerAdditionally:
• Write your own build tooling. 
• Proficient to compile/run multi-file programs

Ability to analyze reason about and debug programs

• Reading &reviewing code
• Debug running programs
• Observability & instrumentation
  • Inculcate observability in your process of writing software.
  • honeycomb.io ‘s Observability Guide.
  • Cindy Sridharan’s Observability Book
• Bart de Smet’s Pluralsight course on ILSpy is full of good information.
  • takes a look at how C# Language features work under the hood. 
• Julia Evans’ talk about her building rbspy is the rough equivalent on RoR

Optionally: Read the ptrace manpage.

A good reflection question :-

“How can I reliably answer a question about a system, without prying open the system?”

Deployments infrastructure & devops

• Linuxacademy.com has a great bunch of hands-on-labs.
• Capistrano deployment system qwiklabs.com also has similar hands-on-labs.
• Software Architecting principles and basic scaling techniques.
• how to design everyday systems-how to use workers,queues and sync processing-
• how to design a data pipeline-data bricks and data pipeline design guideBooks:
  • Martin kleppman’s Designing Data Intensive Apps
  • Michel keeling Design It
  • Gayle laakman- cracking the coding interview -Interesting resource to lookup on potential architecting questions.
  • System Design : [Vasantk gist] & [Donnemartin’s github repo] on Architecting systems.

ABILITY TO WRITE TOY GAMES

• These are good interview skills,
  • For eg. build tetris in an hour.
• write a bot that plays the game you make-
• make a game like
  • minesweeper,
  • snake,
  • jumperfrog etc.

ALGORITMIC ANALYSIS ABILITY AND SOLVING ALGO PROBS

• ability to solve problems recursively-understand the master method to analyze recursive solutions
• Resources:Interiew cake
• Tim Roughgarden’s: Design and analysis of algorithms (coursera)