Self-Improvement on John Hamelink

I've been tying my laces all wrong

Sun, 24 May 2015 15:30:00 +0100

When I was young, I had trouble doing something that most young children struggle with - tying my shoe laces. I am left handed and my parents are both right handed which made learning even more difficult for me than for other children. Eventually, an older boy who was also left handed taught me and the rest was history.

Except that’s not the end of this story - I always had problems with tying shoes ever since. To be clear, it wasn’t the tying of the shoes that was a problem as I grew into my teens and beyond - it was the fact that my knots always seemed slack, which led to me having to re-tie my shoes constantly, and then eventually giving up and just tucking them in, leading to backpain and bad posture.

The Green Developer

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 18:16:00 +0000

A good developer is energy conscious. A good developer understands the impact he has on the environment around him. A good developer is able to take all these things and use them to make a positive impact in his universe. A good developer is a green developer.

A green developer? What are you smoking?

A green developer understands how to build in blocks: he must master the art of software engineering versus software developing. What sets the software engineer apart from the developer is not speed, agility or knowledge, it is the ability to recognise and compartmentalise everything he does into reusable chunks. Why? Simply because reusable code means better code and also half the code.

What makes for a Good Development Lead?

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 21:31:00 +0000

Throughout my career so far, I’ve mostly worked alone. When I say alone, I’ve often worked alongside other people, but ultimately I’ve been paying them, or I had made the choice about whether they were suitable for the project (or for me) or not. They’ve mostly not been working on the same thing I’ve been working on either.

Ultimately, I’ve been the leader of the projects I’ve worked on during most of my freelance career. While at my current fulltime job however, due to the nature of the work I was doing there, I often had to work with other people who I couldn’t choose. This was a great new experience for me, with some terrible 3rd parties from other companies I had to integrate with, and some truly amazing developers I got the chance to work alongside. I learned a lot about what I look for in a leader during my time there, based on excellent leadership skills I saw working with some of the people I worked with, and with other people I saw (mostly in other companies I’m happy to report) make mistakes, I learned how I myself could strive to be that golden leader I wanted so bad. While I don’t claim to be perfect, I feel I have manage to construct a reasonably good guideline on how I should try to conduct myself in order to be the leader I would want to lead me.

Code is Poetry

Fri, 09 Nov 2012 22:19:00 +0000

I once read a much better article than this one by Matt Ward that attempts to show the similarity between code and poetry. Matt shows how the flow and syntax of good code, that abstract minimalism and lowest common denominator approach, is actually very similar to that of a poem.

I agree with everything Matt says, but I felt the article was a little lacking in showing how the coder can be a poet in order to achieve greatness and self-fulfillment (that’s what poetry and coding are partly about, in my opinion). To this end, I’ve compiled some advice I’ve learned by myself or from others over the years in the hope that it will help someone out there on these vast pipes we call the Internets.