Time flies. You might realize that, of course. But when it comes to your skills after a lot time, you can be nicely surprised. I have read code written by me long time ago. At that moment, I was a 11-years-old kid who played with his computer most of his time. Most of my coding production were desktop tools such as a CD Organizer, music indexer, basic accounting applications (for my school book fair), flashcards software to learn English vocabulary, text ciphering applications (well, applying Vigerene method in order to disallow your sister to read your private diary is enough), etc.
Not so long ago, I applied for a Google Summer of Code position to work on Minix 3 in order to provide Minix some kind of USB support. I wanted to do this because I felt I have progressed none during last ten years in my programming career. Now I understand I could not be more wrong.
After reading some of my old code, I have understood I did not spend last ten years in such a bad way. Ten years ago, I didn’t have any mere idea about encapsulation, inheritance, design patterns, regular expressions, coding standards, validation or usability. It was okay, I was a child and I did not have access to the Internet nor proper books. Therefore, I must stop ranting with my friends about if I am making any progress; I do it everyday.
Every time I read a blog post, every time I read a new chapter from the great books I own in my CS shelf and every time I have a great conversation with another developer: all those times, I am making progress.
