a couple booksInteresting. According to OECD numbers, Canada leads the G8 in broadband access, and comes in second in the OECD. Korea's way out in the lead, though. I blame Ragnarok Online. I went over to the UW bookstore today and picked up a couple books. One is entirely Eric's fault. He pointed out Paul Graham and instructed us to read his essays. So I read a few. His Hackers and Painters essay is quite good (despite his perverse obsession with LISP and his occasional barbs at Java), so I bought the book of the same name. His nerds essay is probably more interesting for the general non-programmer audience out there. My highschool experience wasn't nearly as bad, seeing my highschool was neither American or suburban (the latter being by far the more significant as far as I can tell). I can still relate, though. The other book is mostly Matt's fault. Joel "on software" Spolsky posted his foreword to Coder To Developer, which I found myself largely agreeing with. See, here's the thing. I'm not a hacker. I'm not even a terribly good programmer. Well, okay, I'm good enough to stay employed and get decent employee reviews, but I don't personally think I'm terribly good. I don't do any programming in my spare time (I'll maybe do a little messing with PHP for the website, but I really can't bring myself to do that very much). That's mostly because I don't really have any ideas for projects, but even if I come up with something, I can't bring myself to start. I sometimes think it would be a good idea to get involved in some open source project, but then when it comes down to it, my experiences with "the community" have been less than pleasant. I have no problem with coming up with something and releasing it to the world, but if I have to deal with a bunch of insufferable wonks and their politics, I'd rather just keep to myself, thanks. So I'd basically like to change all of that. School did nothing to help me become a decent programmer (I was delusionally hoping it would when I got out of highschool). The only thing for it is to work on it myself. Too bad I still can't think up a decent project to get started with... comments:This post is archived. Comments are disabled. Feel free to send me email if you have something to say. | |
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