The Opinionated Programmer

Lately, I have been finishing up classes for the semester, and doing a lot of studying, and a lot of finishing up projects. I have learned a few very interesting things both about myself, and about finishing up projects. First off, I have learned that sometimes glossing over the simple things can hurt you in the long run. I have been noticing lately that I tend to get the integrated idea of things. For example, if you were to give me a bolt and a nut, I would completely understand that they are to go together, and because of that, they can hold something together. However, if you were to ask me what the purpose of either one of the individual pieces was for, I would tell you that they are to be used with their pair to complete a goal. This type of thinking has been hurting me lately. So, I have been slowing myself down when I learn something, and asking myself, what is the purpose of all of these things individually, before asking the question about what the process of them are together.

The other thing that I have been learning lately, especially with projects, is that every issue can be in one of three different categories. They can either be something you can plan for, something you should have planned for, or something that you couldn’t have planned for. I have had a lot of these issues come up lately. First off, I have gotten ahead of some issues, but asking myself, and then the client, what happens in case A, or is this situation ever possible. Those types of questions have been helping focus how one of the projects I have been working on have been going. I have been able to figure out the scope of this project earlier, so I don’t end up doing extraneous things that aren’t needed.

The other type of situation, those you should have planned for is something that I have been noticing with a project that I am working on that is nearing completion. There are a few things that have come up in meetings, where we both looked at each other, and were confused about how something was working, and it ended up being an earlier miscommunication and if I would have at that time, asked about specific edge cases like I am now doing with the newer project I am working on, these problems would not have come up. This was a failure on my part that I have learned from that has helped me a lot.

Lastly, there are those cases that you can’t plan for. These are the situations that are never fun to see. The other day, I was out at a clients, installing the completed version of a project for them, and an issue with the password for their local database had been recently changed, so the program wasn’t able to connect to it as desired. This wasn’t a hard thing to fix, but it was an example of one of those issues that was thought should be fine, as the database was used, and it was shown working to us, where something as obscure as the password being changed so the connection wasn’t getting made wasn’t something we had thought of, and the fact that it was a local database meant that the password that was used previously to connect would just get changed. This is an example of my least favourite issues, the one that shows up while you are trying to show your product, but at the same time, these are the issues that I don’t mind dealing with. I like thinking on my feet, and figuring things out while the pressure is on, is something I would like to say I am great at, and I feel it really makes me use those critical thinking skills that sometimes like to try and hide away.

Anyway, That is what I have been doing in the last month or so. Over the next few weeks I will be heading down to Argentina and Uraguy, so expect an update after I get back, but probably not one before I leave.

As of late, school has been taking over my life. I have had assignment, after assignment due back to back so I have had little time to do much about it. I have been able to learn a bit about things I didn’t know however. The main class that I have been doing a lot of work in, is Operating Systems. I have been learning a ot of low level ideas along with programming some of them in this class. It is a bit more difficult than I expected, but I am learning a lot.

Otherwise, I am working on preparing for my concert on Friday. I have one song yet that I need to perfect my memorization of, but other than that, I think things will go well. After that, I will be touring next Wednesday through Friday with the same choir around to different high schools in Wisconsin which will be a blast also.

With work, I have been working on a new project while finishing up details with the previous one I have been working on that is almost done. Having the experiance of starting a project from scratch, being allowed to make it my own has been really rewarding for me. Anyway, I need to get going, as I have a lot of stuff to finish up today before the day it done, and there are only so many hours left.

So, school started almost a month ago now, and I have been quite busy with the start of school and have fallen off the face of the earth a bit. I am back now however, so never fear. In the past month or so, I have been getting a lot better at dealing with clients. I have a client that I have been working with for a while and our meetings are completely productive, and we are a lot more clear with each other when talking about what needs to be done on a project.

I got another client for a project that my Senior Software Engineering class is working on, and we had our first meeting yesterday. Everything went beautifully, and we know exactly what we expect of each other. So, things have been going well for me as of late, and I will be updating this once a week again starting now as I have found some time.

Greeting everyone. I would like to tell all of you a little bit about myself, and what this blog is about. For a while, I have been wanting to set up a blog, and now I finally got around to it.

First off, my name is Gary Crabtree, and I am currently a 22 year old college student at the University of Wisconsin Eau Claire. I am a computer science - software engineering major, and a psychology minor. This is the first place I ever learned any type of programming, and it all started with Java for me (hence the terribly tacky title). I have had a small taste of many languages, and design patterns, and that conglomerate of things that a computer science department will teach, but the most significant thing that has had an influence for me, did not actually come from class itself.

At first, I was slightly turned off to programming as it wasn’t what I thought it was going to be at all. Having never touched any code, with the exception of simple HTML, before college, going straight into the computer science department was a significant life choice for me. I had been good at the arts side of things. I was in choir, band, and theater, both musical and non musical, but I felt that why I enjoyed those things was because they were an escape for me from the “real world”. If I was going to go into any of those as a career, I think it would have lost its meaning to me. So, I figured I will always be able to find community theater, and choirs/bands wherever I go, and I decided to keep it a significant part of my life, but to pursue other endeavors.

I swayed my other options, and they came down to computer science, and psychology. So, I decided to go with computer science as a main focus as I felt that it would give me the best variety of options in careers after a degree with it. So, I proceeded to take classes at the university, homework outside of classes, and spending the rest of my time leisurely for a few years until one day, things changed.

I got a job for the university doing web development. I had done a bit of HTML as mentioned, and some simple things from classes as well, so I figured it would be a great way to earn some money as I was in need of some greatly. So, in the summer of 2007, I started said job doing simple static design work.  By the end of the summer however, I had started expressing interest in learning the application side of web design as well, and I proceeded to let me bosses know that if possible, I would like to move in that direction. So, towards the end of that summer, I started training in something that would greatly influence the rest of my college career, and undoubtedly, my life. What I speak of, is Ruby on Rails.

Once I started it, I didn’t understand why everyone advocated so strongly for it; it took me a good chunk of time before I would either. I didn’t get to fully do Rails work until almost that following summer due to other static projects that came up, and then I got to take another look at it. This time, I started to slowly see what was cool about it after a year of working with languages such as C/C++, Scheme, and Prolog in my classes. Slowly, over this previous year, I have gotten to spend a lot more time working with it, and it is leading me to stay with it in the future. Although I still have a lot to learn about it, I plan to continue working with it professionally when out of school as well.

I feel that I have gotten to tell you all about my story, and where I am coming from as well. This blog will be where I will talk about what I learn both with Rails, and other technologies either through school, work, or anywhere else.