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The Best Advice I Ever Got

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Just a quick link today:

The super nice people over at InformIT (*) are running a series of short articles with the theme "the best advice I ever got", which I think should prove to be an interesting series. They were kind enough to ask me to give an example of some good advice I got that helped my programming career, though as you'll see it is not actually about programming at all.

(*) You may recall that they also recently asked me for my advice on good books for C# programmers. In the interests of full disclosure, I note that in my spare time I write and edit C# programming books for Addison-Wesley, which is owned by the same company that owns InformIT.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    I learn more on StackOverflow than at my university. Ambivalence I'd say.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    you most frequently use language is C# ? I thought you mostly programming in C-with-classes before Roslyn right ? :-)

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    I completely agree with what you wrote. The best questions on StackOverflow are the ones that are interesting to me, but I don't know the answer to them. When I answer such question after doing the research, I learn something new and it feels goods.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    @soonstudios I think StackOverflow and university are not really comparable. StackOverflow is awesome if you want to know some very specific thing. But if you want to learn the general concepts and theory, I think university education is invaluable.

  • Anonymous
    June 27, 2012
    The most valuable advice I ever received in my career is never to write anything in a comment that would cause your boss embarrassment if he showed it to a client.  This advice may have been given after the fact though.

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2012
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    June 28, 2012
    You know, StackOverflow really is great.  See, "iron sharpen iron" and on StackOverflow that occurs.  I've been writing enterprise business software for more than 12 years now, and there are a number of things that don't really challenge me anymore, but up there I can certainly find something that does!  I have to agree with you 100% Eric, answering somebody elses question only concretes it in yourself.

  • Anonymous
    June 29, 2012
    My first manager in computing (IBM mainframe) taught me: "Always fix one thing at a time. If you break something, you'll know what caused it."

  • Anonymous
    June 30, 2012
    Bing development from scratch is authored by hectorruiz1954@live.com./designer/creator

  • Anonymous
    July 02, 2012
    The best advice I got so far for which I follow in life and in my job is "Living with your means". which will help Resource Management skills enrich each time you follow both in your career and in life

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2012
    "Not <i>actually</i> about programming at all" is true only under a very narrow definition of what programming actually is.