Like a lot of people I spend quite a bit of time reading the technical blogs as a constant source of knowledge and advancement.
A couple of posts both inspired and got me thinking over the weekend so I thought I’d quickly mention both in case anybody missed them, they’re a great read.
The first was by Ben Nadel on a book called The Dip which is subtitled “A Little Book That Teaches You When To Quit (And When To Stick)” and delivers a huge message:
you MUST quit when you know you’re on a dead end path.
Ben lists a couple of quotes from the book including:
… the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.
The second post was by Peter (oh my god I have no idea how that guy has the time and energy to write as frequently as he does and still find time to breathe let alone work!) Bell on Why you want to learn DSLs.
I actually got a lot out of the following which mightn’t have actually been the ‘meat’ of Peter’s original post:
The most powerful tools a programmer has are the concepts that they use to think about solving problems.
Generally programmers with more concepts are more likely to come up with better solutions to a wider range of problems as they have more tools in their toolkit (which is why it is worth learning about OO and functional programming even if you’re not planning to write code in Java and Haskell any time soon).
The problem as a programmer is that when you only have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. This works fine until you come across a screw and suddenly your trusty hammer doesn’t seem quite as useful as it used to.
Thanks to both Ben and Peter for sharing these with us, great reading and quite (for me at least) thought provoking.