12 Things Every Programmer Should
Know by Samnang Chhun Barcamppp 2010

About Me • samnang.chhun@gmail.com •
@samnangchhun • http://tech.wowkhmer.com • Ruby and Rails Developer • .NET Developer (MCTS) • Yoolk Inc. • Share Vision Team Core Member

1 Be Passionate • Love
what you are doing • Be creative • Want to do it best • Better than yesterday

2 Love Your Codes •
Write codes for human, but bad programmers write codes for machine • Every programmer loves to work with Clean Code

3 Version Control • Backup
your codes • Tracking changes (who, what, when) • Work in parallel • Commit often • Never commit when your build fail

4 Read Codes • Before
you become a good writer, you have to be a good reader • Day and day programmers working hours: 70% reading and 30% writing • Take notes on ideas or tricks of the author

5 Practice, Practice, Practice •
Small exercises, isolated problems • Practice on outside company projects • Do your best as you can(no pressure) • Practice to become a master • CodeKata, Paring Tour, Fixing bugs in an OSS that you are using

6 Refactoring • Improve quality
of your codes, without changing system behavior • Make it easy to understand, maintain, and extend • “Always check a module in cleaner than when you checked it out”, Uncle Bob • Intension-Revealing Names, Small Method, Compose Method, …

7 Follow Patterns and Best
Practices • Object Oriented Design Principles • SOLID • GRASP • DRY • KISS • Don’t Tell Us • Design Patterns

8 TDD/BDD • Tests are
specifications what the system does • Tests are your first user • Short development iteration • Is a design process • Write just enough codes to pass the tests

9 Automation • Make your
manual tasks are automatable • Command line are your friend • Make a shortcut of your repeated tasks • Continuous Integration • Automation Deployment

Understand 10 Your Domain •
Domain-specific won’t be outdate soon, but technologies will • “You can’t creatively help a business until you know how it works.” Chad Fowler

Continuous 11 Learning • You
need to keep learning to stay marketable • “Be the worst,” Chad Fowler • Read books, blogs, Twitters feeds, and websites • Listen to podcasts • Sharpening your tools

Participate in 12 Communities •
A good way to learn something is to teach or speak about it • Join or start a study group or a local user group for a language, technology, or discipline you are interested in. • Contribute to OSS

References

Q&A