Programming – Which belt are you ?
At Stratbeans we believe that programming is an art form, which cannot be improved upon unless one starts to enjoy it.
Seldom you would know of an artist who does not enjoy his craft and yet produces masterpieces. To learn an art you have to adhere to some rules and disciplines.
Programming also requires a proper discipline.
My mentor, who was himself was an ace programmer, told me that just like in karate there is gradation in terms of belt, similar is the gradation of programmers. When I was curious to know more about it, he told me this:
As a white-belt (or noob as known in the gamer's world) you have a tendency to jump into the war without any planning. As soon as a white-belt programmer sees a programming challenge, he hands starts itching to code. He tends to do hand-combat and solve the problem on its way down. Even if he wins the war he looses a lot of blood.
With time and introspection and proper guidance one moves up towards the black-belt. He starts to partition planning and execution. He keeps his keyboard far far away and creates a (game) plan and uses various (military) strategy like divide-and-conquer, factoring etc to break/weaken the problem. My mentor use to sum it will by telling "once you have planned properly then coding is nothing but a final mechanical exercise - which is generally done on a keyboard
".
Which Belt Are You !
All said and done, at Stratbeans we strive for the following :
1. Taking our team's programming skill away from white-belt AND closer to black-belt
2. Making Programming a fun exercise !