Christian Peters

I recently went on a team outing where we took an improv class. One of the ideas of the class was that you need to accept the idea provided by your partner(s) in the scene. If you contradict that idea then you are taking away from what they are trying to build for the audience. The core idea is to "say yes" and go with the flow of the scene. This will tend to lead to funnier moments than if you are are fighting against your partner(s). This made me think about how life outside of improv and comedy is normally not this way. The instructions to the class to "say yes" are needed because this is not the way most people behave most of the time. How often do you hear someone disagree with a suggestion someone else gave them? It's almost like a reflex to some people. No matter what the suggestion is or who it came from they disagree with it immediately and clearly couldn't have considered the suggestion. I wonder if that sort of mindset leads to a negative outl...

I was recently fixing a bug in some code and while I was figuring out what the problem was I came across some code that looked something like this: If x == 1 Then      doWorkBasedOn(x) Else      doWorkBasedOn(x) No matter which path the code took the result would be the same as just calling doWorkBasedOn and passing x as the parameter. My assumption is that someone started this code doing the check for x and then calling doWorkBasedOn(x) assuming that future logic would not always result in the same path. Then someone else, I hope, came in and added the else statement to get their story completed without really looking at what the previous code was doing. Regardless of how the code got to this state, the last person to work on it should have taken a second to step back and look at what they were doing. Because this code was needlessly complex, a bug was introduced. Had this been done without this extra complexity it would have worked ...

I consider myself to be a very logical person. I tend to favor practicality to aesthetics. I feel like this lends itself well to being a developer. I think that logic is seen as a key trait when looking for a developer. I agree, a big part of being a good developer is about being able to think through a problem logically and come to a conclusion that will solve the problem. I think that one thing that separates really good developers is that they have at least some amount of creativity. Logic allows them to see the problem and work through how to best solve it given their past experience and knowledge. Creativity allows them to see a problem differently and come to a solution by seeing how things can work in a way that they have not done before. Creativity allows for connecting ideas not previously used together to creates something new. If you want to improve yourself as a developer, I would suggest that you do something creative outside of work. Expand what you do and gain new ex...