I Have 4.5 Out of 6 Good Programmer Indicators

Daniel, a business guy, lists 6 traits that he believes help identify a good programmer. It’s written for those who aren’t programmers, and want to hire good programmers. I tend to agree with all the points he makes.

The 2 I have slight contention with are the ones I don’t nail; imagine that.

1. Passion

Hell yeah… you either have to tear me away from work with a crowbar, or I have to be seriously burnt out. I love this shiz.

2. Self-teaching and love of learning

I don’t read books or documentation to learn. Instead, I like diving into the code head first and go, “wtf… this is overwhelming!” I do, however, love books and docs for reference. Gooooooo Flex documentation team! Yall rock. Moock is dope, too.

Also, I have a really short attention span. I like learning new stuff over and over and over…

3. Intelligence

My D&D character of myself has an Intelligence of 13. That means, I get at LEAST a +2 to all Intelligence related skill checks.

The only social situations I have issue with is when someone is talking at me vs. talking with me, or their insanely pompous.

4. Hidden Experience

Heck yeah, you have to to keep abreast. I have 2 folders of relevance on my computer: “_Projects” and “_Work Projects”. I store my personal stuff in Personal and work related stuff in Work Projects. The underscore makes them go to the top when sorted by name. I have tons more folders in my Projects folder than I do in my Work Projects folder. Some are small tests to learn things that I want to refer to later. Others are full blown pet projects that I spend weeks on.

This doesn’t include open source, uploading examples to my blog, writing code for conference presentations, etc. None of that is work related; it’s all on my own personal time.

5. Variety of Technologies

I get this half-way. I do not do a variety of technologies; at least the way he describes it. I stick to the Adobe client stack of Flash, Flex, Fireworks, Photoshop, as well as a decent amount of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript as well as all the other support technologies (ANT, JSFL, etc).

I’ve done a decent amount of PHP & ASP classic in the past to help my Flash coding endeavors and a tincy bit of Ruby on Rails to learn what all the fuss was about.

Bottom line, though, I’m a specialist. I focus on my area and want to be the best at what I do.

I think what homeskillet was referring to was not that you are proficient in a wide array of technologies from other stacks, but rather that you’ve used them enough to recognize their strengths and weaknesses. The best discussions in the Flash & Flex world are when people from other dicicplines contribute ideas from other worlds and challenge current assumptions. Breaking out of the bubble and leaving your comfort zone in order to expand your programming horizons.

Reading how Spring, and other cool things can be beneficial to Flex from the Java sphere or having to hear how ActionScript sucks for 2 days straight from a .NET guy because it doesn’t have a built in clone method. There are many great ideas that have been out for awhile. Learning about what benefits other technology stacks offer helps give you more context to what you know.

6. Formal Qualificiations

While I agree certifications are crap, I didn’t program before college/uni. My life before then focused on Rollerblading, video games, D&D, and chasing women. I only started programming half-way into my college curriculum.

Formality is crap anyway, though. If you can’t use Google to learn, not sure what to tell you. Half the knowledge you need to know is out there on the interwebs. The rest you can learn on your own. There are also a ton of great programming books to learn from as well. For the record, I did enjoy and learn a lot from college.

Via Visual Rinse.

How to disable Snap.com popups in Firefox

If you know of an IE PC fix and/or a Mac Safari fix, feel free to link in the comments.

If you, like me, loathe Snap.com‘s popups, and refuse to have a cookie from their site as a removal solution, here’s what you do.

For Firefox:

  1. Go here.
  2. Install the plugin (click link at bottom)
  3. Restart Firefox.
  4. Click “Adblock” on bottom right of Firefox
  5. Add “spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js” into the text field. Click Ok.

If the link in step 1 link rots, search Google for “AdBlock”. If you can’t install the plugin, make sure Firefox isn’t blocking the installation from it. You should see a yellow bar at the top of the page letting you know the installation failed. You can click the edit button there to allow that site to install plugins.

Additionally, you can use it for Intellitxt as well, the gents who make the ad pop-ups for the double underlined green links (not always green).

Via Boing Boing.

Chunk vs. Picard, Juggernaut, & Ruby on Rizz-nails Weekend

*** Warning: links are not work safe ***

BANG, BANG sucka (turn up your speakers), I’m the Juggernaut. Imma hit chu wif ya own pimp!

Talked to Steven Wednesday night, guy who sent me bang bang, about Ruby. I got to ask a bunch of questions about it and apparently, it does all the crap I hate doing in back-end code for me. Her majesty’s gone for the week, so I’m going to give Ruby & Rails a run through this weekend; gotta bunch of docs to read + 2 hosts. Ben Jackson I believe already wrote a Remoting-esque implementation for Flash so at least this isn’t 100% new territory.