This week i read chapters 11 and 12 in The Clean Coder by Robert C. Martin.
Chapter 11 is about pressure in the workplace. As someone who has not yet had a full time programming job this is not something that i have a ton of experience in so this chapter was extra interesting. I’m sure even assignments due in a small time frame cannot compare to the pressure of programming in a full time career under a time restraint. The first tip that the author suggests is avoiding pressure altogether whenever possible. This goes back to one of the main points of the entire book, which is not committing to things that you are not one-hundred percent sure of. If there is no way to avoid the pressure, then the best way to go about it is to maintain your discipline throughout the pressure. He discusses how disciplines you abandon in times of pressure are not really your disciplines at all if you do not believe in them enough to maintain using them when it matters most. Maintaining your disciplines, remembering not to panic and communicating with your team are the best ways to get through a high pressure environment in the best way possible.
Chapter 12 is about Collaboration. At the beginning of this chapter the author goes on to describe the average programmer, someone who most likely does not enjoy working with people and much prefers machines. Although as he also said this is not all programmers, i completely agree and most of the time this is me to a tee. Working with other people causes so many complications. However as he also says not working with others can be catastrophic. As much as we would like to just sit by ourselves work on our own code and not have social interaction, that is just not possible and for good reason. He talks about something called collective ownership which is a very good concept to have in my opinion. This means that as a team you take collective ownership for all the code in your department, not just the code that you have written. This creates a much better quality code, and helps people to work much better. Robert also talks about pair programming and how rewarding of an experience it can be and i could not agree more with this as well. Pair programming is an opportunity to learn so much from someone with more experience or to pass on your experience to someone who is new. Not to mention it can help you get past roadblocks in your code.