Advice To A New Programmer

Advice to a New Programmer

So much advice is heaped upon beginners that it can be hard to know where to start. However, these five practices are the foundation upon which everything else is built. The beginner I have in mind has a basic understanding of how programming works, has written mostly small programs of varying complexity, and is heading off to either a career in the field or committed to excellence for his or own personal projects. There is only one truly foundational activity in programming: writing code. To be good at it, you’re going to have to write a lot of code. That big body of work can be a vehicle for growth, or an exercise in repeatedly practicing a limited set of skills. To avoid the latter, you need to: Read a lot of code. Specifically, read a lot of code by excellent programmers. Not just good programmers, like the guy down the hall, but excellent ones. Due to the huge amount of open source today, this is easy to do. When I was learning Java, I read code from the Tomcat project and from the CI server, Cruise Control. I’ve read lots of good code since. It might be tempting to look for main() and start from there, but you’re likely to spend a lot of time just reading set-up code and command-line parsing. I prefer to scan the filenames to look for some activity that interests me and then dig into those files. It’s not crucial to understand the whole project or the ins and outs of the entire design, you’ll wear yourself out doing this. Read the code. Look at the comments, see what the authors are doing, and how they went about it. Learn your tools thoroughly. I think the greatest loss of programming time is not in debugging or rewriting code, but in the innumerable seconds lost here and there by developers who don’t really know their tools. I am referring to: the IDE, the language, the build system, and the VCS. Of these, the IDE and the language are by far the most important. You should, after a few weeks of practice, know almost every keystroke combo in the IDE, so that you touch the mouse only when it saves a lot of keystrokes. If you know the keystrokes, you know the commands. If you use the mouse only, you know only menus on which you tend to click on the same one or two entries. Knowing the IDE is pure discipline. Knowing large languages, such as Java or C++, takes more than discipline. They’re huge, as are their libraries. Reading is the best approach, in my view. Read code that uses features you don’t know and you’ll look for opportunities to use them. Books (rather than blogs) are another excellent source. Read about features that are on the periphery of what you use currently, and soon you’ll find the periphery expanding. Knowing the VCS and build systems make you a desirable team member — who doesn’t waste time due of ignorance of important operations. Plan your code before you write it. I think this is the most difficult item on this list. In exchange, it probably delivers the most benefit. I’m not thinking of formal design — at your stage, that’s unlikely to be necessary. But you do need to plan out the code in some manner other than carrying it around in your head. The simplest approach is to write up a small document (I frequently use a mind map): What are the requirements for this code? How will you implement it? What do I need to know that I don’t know now? What are the objects I will need or need to create? And write this out. Only then begin to code, you’ll find the code much easier to write, to document, and to get correct. Save your notes — they’re great reference material. Write lots of code and have it reviewed. If your site does not do code reviews, do them yourself. Find the best programmer who’ll give you useful advice in a way that can be heard and understood. Don’t be a pest, but don’t avoid the process because you’re shy, busy, or feel you’re good enough, etc. Code reviews should be part of your programming life. Be creative. Try pair programming with someone more senior than you for an afternoon. The important thing is that you need feedback that you cannot give yourself. Write tests as you code. This advice is perhaps the only controversial item here. It’s not an endorsement of TDD. But it is an endorsement of knowing that your code works in most scenarios it will face. Start with unit tests and exercise new code with edge-case values. For example, does your function work if it is passed a negative value, or the maximum integer size? If not, does it throw an informative exception or just blow up? If not an exception, have you narrowed the range of inputs with asserts? If so, test the asserts. Use the planning you did earlier to write mocks, and then begin testing your new code with objects you still need to write. This will clarify design issues in your current code and the upcoming objects. Save your tests and run them prior to every check-in, so that they can be early warning systems for later code that breaks your current code. There’s a lot more advice and many wise sayings that can be added to this list. But that’s part of the problem: There’s so much advice available that it’s difficult to know exactly where to start. For that reason, I purposely limit my recommendations to just five points. If you apply them with diligence, you’ll soon find two things: You’ll be able to handle progressively larger and more important tasks, and you’ll look back in embarrassment at code you wrote just a few months ago. Both experiences are sure signs of progress. Good luck!

Tags

programming

List of extrasolar candidates for liquid water

The following list contains candidates from the list of confirmed objects that meet the following criteria:

Confirmed object orbiting within a circumstellar habitable zone of Earth mass or greater (because smaller objects may not have the gravitational means to retain water) but not a star

Has been studied for more than a year

Confirmed surface with strong evidence for it being either solid or liquid

Water vapour detected in its atmosphere

Gravitational, radio or differentation models that predict a wet stratum

55 Cancri f

List Of Extrasolar Candidates For Liquid Water

With a mass half that of Saturn, 55 Cancri f is likely to be a gas giant with no solid surface. It orbits in the so-called “habitable zone,” which means that liquid water could exist on the surface of a possible moon. ]

Proxima Centauri b

Proxima Centauri b is an exoplanet orbiting in the habitable zone of the red dwarfstar Proxima Centauri, which is the closest star to the Sun and part of a triple star system. It is located about 4.2 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Centaurus, making it the closest known exoplanet to the Solar System.

Gliese 581c

Gliese 581c gained interest from astronomers because it was reported to be the first potentially Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of its star, with a temperature right for liquid water on its surface, and by extension, potentially capable of supporting extremophile forms of Earth-like life.

Gliese 667 Cc

Gliese 667 Cc is an exoplanet orbiting within the habitable zone of the red dwarf star Gliese 667 C, which is a member of the Gliese 667 triple star system, approximately 23.62 light-years away in the constellation of Scorpius.

Gliese 1214 b

Gliese 1214 b is an exoplanet that orbits the star Gliese 1214, and was discovered in December 2009. Its parent star is 48 light-years from the Sun, in the constellation Ophiuchus. As of 2017, GJ 1214 b is the most likely known candidate for being an ocean planet. For that reason, scientists have nicknamed the planet “the waterworld”.

HD 85512 b

HD 85512 b is an exoplanet orbiting HD 85512, a K-type main-sequence star approximately 36 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Vela.

Due to its mass of at least 3.6 times the mass of Earth, HD 85512 b is classified as a rocky Earth-size exoplanet (<5M⊕) and is one of the smallest exoplanets discovered to be just outside the inner edge of the habitable zone.

MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb

MOA-2007-BLG-192Lb, occasionally shortened to MOA-192 b, is an extrasolar planet approximately 3,000 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. The planet was discovered orbiting the brown dwarf or low-mass star MOA-2007-BLG-192L. At a mass of approximately 3.3 times Earth, it is one of the lowest-mass extrasolar planets at the time of discovery. It was found when it caused a gravitational microlensing event on May 24, 2007, which was detected as part of the MOA-II microlensing survey at the Mount John University Observatory in New Zealand.

Kepler-22b

Kepler-22b, also known by its Kepler object of interest designation KOI-087.01, is an extrasolar planet orbiting within the habitable zone of the Sun-like star Kepler-22. It is located about 587 light-years (180 pc) from Earth in the constellation of Cygnus. source

Tags

astronomy

1K notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

5 years ago

Nikola Tesla - The True Discoverer of the Rotating Magnetic Field

"Many erroneous statements have appeared in print relative to my discovery of the rotating magnetic field and invention of the induction motor which I was compelled to pass in silence. Great interests have waged a long and bitter contest for my patent rights; commercial animosities and professional jealousies were aroused, and I was made to suffer in more than one way. But despite of all pressure and efforts of ingenious lawyers and experts, the rulings of the courts were in support of my claims for priority in every instance without exception. The battles have been fought and forgotten, the thirty or forty patents granted to me on the alternating system have expired, I have been released of burdensome obligations and am free to speak...

"...A few words should be said in regard to the various claims for anticipation which were made upon the issuance of my patents in 1888, and in numerous suits conducted subsequently. There were three contestants for the honor, Ferraris, Schallenberger and Cabanellas. All three succumbed to grief. The opponents of my patents advanced the Ferraris claim very strongly, but any one who will peruse his little Italian pamphlet, which appeared in the spring of 1888, and compare it with the patent record filed by me seven months before, and with my paper before the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, will have no difficulty in reaching a conclusion. Irrespective of being behind me in time, Prof. Ferraris's publication concerned only my split-phase motor, and in an application for a patent by him priority was awarded to me. He never suggested any of the essential practical features which constitute my system, and in regard to the split-phase motor he was very decided in his opinion that it was of no value. Both Ferraris and Schallenberger discovered the rotation accidentally while working with a Gullard and Gibbs transformer, and had difficulty in explaining the actions. Neither of them produced a rotating field motor like mine, nor were their theories the same as my own. As to Cabanellas, the only reason for his claim is an abandoned and defective technical document. Some over-zealous friends have interpreted a United States patent granted to Bradley as a contemporary record, but there is no foundation whatever for such a claim. The original application only described a generator with two circuits which were provided for the sole purpose of increasing the output. There was not much novelty in the idea, since a number of such machines existed at that time. To say that these machines were anticipations of my rotary transformer is wholly unjustified. They might have served as one of the elements in my system of transformation, but were nothing more than dynamos with two circuits constructed with other ends in view and in utter ignorance of the new and wonderful phenomena revealed through my discovery."

–Nikola Tesla

“Some Personal Recollections.” Scientific American, June 5, 1915.

Tags

nikola tesla

486 notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

6 years ago

*me on ellen*

ellen: so i hear u like spyro the dragon

me: yeah i guess u could say i’m a bit of a fan

*everyone in the audience turns to crystal*

me: omg ellen u didn’t

Tags

spyro LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO SOSSKKSKSSJJS

327 notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

5 years ago

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

—Carl Sagan

Tags

carl sagan

336 notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

6 years ago

CHOOSE YOUR FIGHTER

Tags

gif old web steve jobs bill gates

260 notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

6 years ago

Tags

ai artificial intelligence

510 notes View Post

tres-4b-blog

6 years ago

hi. happy holidays. I'm going to start my college next month. I'm generally a messy student. I have a hard time managing my schedules and notes. I recently started following some studyblrs. but I'm still lost. I could really use some advice right now. love your studyblr btw.

Helloo! Happy holidays as well :-) Here are a few links that might help:

how to improve your handwriting

balancing study and work

whats in my bag

my favourite stationery

back to school basic supplies

how I stay motivated

tips on maintaining motivation

how to start a studyblr

how to take effective class or lecture notes

how to take notes from a textbook

how to memorise information effectively