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May 22nd, 2012
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  1. So you have decided that your problem needs to be solved with some kind of code written in {structured,unstructured,object-oriented,functional,logical} programming language. Before you forge ahead there are several things I have to make sure that you are aware of.
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  3. 1) You are not a special snowflake. You're just not. Your mom might think so but she's your mom so her opinion in this regard is irrelevant. Chances are somebody else who is way smarter than you also had a similar problem and solved it much better than you could ever hope of solving. So do some research and copy that smarter person. Not copying that smarter person's solution is only going to lead to headache and sleepless nights.
  4. 2) You are in all probability young and as a consequence a terrible coder. Coding is a craft and you don't get good at it by going to school, attending lectures, and reading books. You get good at it with constant practice and reading books and you just don't have enough practice and book learning in you. So if you have failed to find somebody else's solution to your problem then you need to go back and look again.
  5. 3) Along with being a shitty coder you also don't know what problem you are trying to solve. If you did you wouldn't be wasting your time reading this list. Since you don't know what problem you are trying to solve not only is your code going to be shitty it is also going to be horribly complex and convoluted.
  6. 4) Your first version is going to suck so hard that the only right thing to do at the end of the entire ordeal will be to throw it out. You will not want to do this because you are young and naive. It is going to be personal and a huge blow to your ego but after crying yourself to sleep several nights in a row because you are such a shitty coder you will throw out your baby. Don't worry the second version will suck just as hard. Do yourself a favor and pick a language and a set of tools that are designed for fast iteration. My personal choices would be ruby for the coding part and flat text files for the storage. If you need to be even fancier with your storage then go with sqlite. Anything more complicated and you are just wasting time and effort. Remember you are a shitty coder and you don't really know what problem you are trying to solve.
  7. 5) Try to make your solution open source. It will be both good for you and others because if you looked for an already existing solution and couldn't find one then chances are there is a real need for what you are doing but you should leave some of the heavier lifting to people that are more experienced than you and don't suck as hard.
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  9. If you still think you have what it takes to solve your problem with code then go right ahead and fail as hard and as quickly as you can. It's obvious there is no talking sense into you.
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