44th Day As An iOS Developer With No Experience

Nov 2, 2015 - 44th Day As An iOS Developer With No Experience

Monday - Ah another day today. I will be posting two tutorials today. I'm going to tell you my kind CTO's story. His journey in iOS Development. His journey in the world of software development and engineering. How he became a great programmer. Okay, but first, here are the tutorials that I will be making (after publishing this post, I'm going to start to make the tutorials and then embed the link of those to the following:)

1. Pushing View Controller From Left To Right, and Pop View Controller From Right To Left.
2. Sliding Up Views With Animation, and dismissing the keyboard.


- His post/story starts here (this is the link of his post, he sent (his employees) us this via skype: CLICK HERE-

TITLE OF THIS POST:

When I Was Told My Code Is Shit

October 21, 2015

I had always thought of myself as a strong programmer; not every one I know has thought the same. 

The year was 1995. I had already been heavily exposed to MS-DOS in the late 80’s, because my mother was a workaholic who always brought me along to her office and I had nothing better to do but tinker with her Intel 80286 PC (later updated to a 386, then much later, a 486) while she toiled away with her legal paperwork. My father, who then worked in Saudi Arabia, during his annual return to the Philippines, thought it’d be a good idea to bring home the latest and hottest piece of technology available at the time - a fucking Pentium 100 running on the widely celebrated, newly released Windows 95 operating system. It was a thing of beauty. He also brought home with him a collection of CD-ROM software comprising of various games, Encarta (90’s kid Wikipedia), and some productivity software. He told me about how he and his officemates would enjoy playing Prince of Persia during their downtime, but he stressed that this - this new Windows thing - is a million times more capable of what he had gotten used to.

It wasn’t the first time I had ever seen a mouse; I’d seen those at the advanced computer labs in our school, but never had I used one, nor had I slid a mouse cursor around a beautiful graphical interface before. My father taught me how to use Windows, and then said something that probably shaped my life in a deep and crucial way: Explore mo lang ‘yang Windows, maganda ‘yan; ‘wag ka matakot na masira mo.; so with his blessing, I did just that. I learned how to play games, install them, and use the various software he would bring home every return trip to the Philippines. In one of those trips, he brought back an intimidating CD. Unlike games, the box for this one was non-descript and explained nothing about what it does. It was Borland C++. I’m getting fucking shivers right now as I typed that. My father was never a programmer, he was an accountant. He would later reveal to me, during my adult life, that he was interested in shifting careers and becoming one, since programming was all the rage back then and I assume it’s because computer programmers were paid a shitload of money. 

I installed Borland C++ on the PC and stared at it, typed some stuff in, and pressed buttons for probably about 30 minutes to an hour before I gave up trying to understand what it was for. It would be years later, in high school, when I would finally “get it”.

The year was 1999. I spent most of my time in a dorm room, away from a PC. My knowledge of programming would come from books I would read (and barely understand) on the weekdays, and practice would....

CLICK HERE TO CONTINUE TO PART 2...

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When I Was Told My Code Is Shit Part 2

When I Was Told My Code Is Shit Part 2...

and practice would come during the weekends when I went home to type the sample code on Borland to see how it worked. I studied at the Philippine Science, where most of my classmates would be way ahead of me in most other subjects. I was ahead of them in Music and Art, but the smartest kids in class could easily overtake me in Maths and other subjects. Computer Science, though - that was a whole different story. I fucking owned everyone at Computer Science, even our teachers, sometimes. My classmates hated it, but writing code was almost as easy as breathing air for me.

I didn’t understand why others would need to ask questions or ask for clarifications during lectures. I got baffled whenever I saw people take out pad papers to simulate for- loops. My teachers were flabbergasted with how I chained functions together, wrote recursions, and how I always had a way of solving problems differently from everyone else. I was asked to be part of the programming “varsity” team, which represented the school (and the country) in programming competitions. I would experience failing in exams in every other subject I took in high school, but I could miss every single CS lecture and still ace any programming exam.

So that’s my origin story; every hero has one. The kid whose superpower isn’t an unnatural computational power of the mind, but rather, an uncanny ability to find computational solutions to anything the mind dares to ask.

I had always seen myself as an exceptionally strong programmer; but, not every one I know has seen me as such. My code has been called shit — and for good reason, I would admit — and quite recently as well.

The year was 2010. I was working as the lead mobile software engineer at my previous company. I had just gotten promoted due to some heroics (read: hard work) I did to win a multi-million peso account for that startup. I had also just filed my resignation from that company to create Smartwave Studios. One day, at work, one of the senior software engineers who reported to me asked to sit down and have coffee - he stressed that it was his "treat". I seriously wondered why, because this person had a strong reputation for being a cheapskate, and also, it was obvious that he didn’t like me because he was much older, and worked at the company for much longer than I have, but missed out on the promotion to lead engineer due to the circumstance that it was given to me instead. That said, I hesitantly agreed.

During coffee, he told me the story of “a guy he once worked with”, who enamored the bosses, rose quickly through the ranks, and mandated that all developers reporting to him use a new framework for developing their biggest project, only to leave a few months later, taking with him all his expertise and leaving the company with a codebase no other developer knew how to fully utilize. This may or may not have been a made-up person, but his point got clearly across. I was the asshole who convinced everyone to do things my way, then leave. 

Your code is shit — he said, sorry to say it, but you don’t know how to program delegates. You have absolutely no idea what you’re doing.

I didn’t know how to respond. Truth was raining from the sky. I had developed some pretty shit code, I can say this now, and it haunts me in my dreams and in my waking hours, even at 5:09 AM, five years later, as I’m typing this log entry — it still haunts me.

The thing with writing shit code is that people tend to never forget. You can be writing truly brilliant software at present, yet still be judged for that shit method you wrote years back for the rest of your life. Even at Smartwave, we call it "Kosa code", named after our beloved former co-worker, Kosa, who "pioneered” writing bullshit code at the company (although the forefather has got to be JM). In reality, though, Kosa is now probably a highly respectable coder, and all of us have written shitty, delete-worthy code at some point in our lives — even me, Ruz, Gerald, Henry — everyone. 

I now appreciate that person from 5 years ago — the former co-worker who told me that I wrote shit code. I had always thought of myself as an extremely strong programmer, but that was because I was actually very weak. Everything you’ve just read about my "origin story” is completely true — but that’s not how heroic programmers come about. It’s hard work and practice that’ll eventually get you there. So to anyone who actually got this far in reading this, keep writing shit code — seriously — know you’re shit and embrace it, love it, don’t get offended when someone tells you that your code is shit — instead, learn from the experience and write slightly less shitty code after that — and I promise that someday, you won’t even notice it until you sit back and look at your code — but someday, you’ll catch yourself staring at your screen and saying “Wow, I just wrote some pretty awesome code." 

// dugong_sw

Hi, DR here, if you got inspired by the story of my CTO, please share this and subscribe. I have another story posted. This time, I'm posting the story of our senior backend developer. Sir J. CLICK HERE to read his story in software development world!

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The Adventure Of Our Senior Backend Developer

This is the story of our senior backend developer. I hope you get inspired by this. :) He is a PHP developer by the way.

My first code was in c++ . Honestly, since first year college, i was already used to hearing shit coder , shit code , shit on everything related to programming .

I was depressed so I failed my first programming subject and even decided to just shift course . But i did not. I continued and did everything in my power to prove them wrong . I was a torrent guy. Downloaded all the possible resources to improve my coding skills , watched some videos, learned new stuff ahead from my batchmates and during early fourth year , i earned some respect . I was being tagged as "one-man team".

My first group (with patrick) are the first students who ever developed a 3d project in malayan and my thesis group was praised as the only group who completed thesis as a fully functional e-commerce with sand box payment . It's not extraordinary, i know. But JC (our CTO) is right . My code is really shit even recently i had some. But if you just continue to stare at it. You will just notice that everytime you revise it and make it better, it is becoming less shit and soon you will just realized that your code is actually better .

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