The Problem

We’re trying to find a way of getting from “decent” at building programs, to “great”.

There are abundant resources to get you from “beginner” to “decent”. Once you get to “decent”, there’s a high risk of plateauing. This may be because of the context you are in and developers around you — what is merely “decent” from the point of view of this book, may be considered “pretty good”, and your environment stops pushing you towards improvement. The Internet is no friend here — StackOverflow is filled with answers ranging from mediocre to appalling. And then there’s the whole train wreck that happened with the JavaScript revolution and democratization of coding. Mediocrity and slowly reinventing the wheel became daily reality. The fathers of our industry must be either severely depressed, or laughing themselves to tears, seeing how not only little new of note was invented in the last decade, much worse, the wisdom they brought to us got forgotten, and is slowly, bit by bit, getting re-invented. What a waste of a generation.

So, however dramatic it may sound, to get from “decent” to “great”, you need to become a monk of sorts. Distance yourself from fashion, from the masses, chill out, calm down, and observe, both the world around you and yourself. Do stuff that is ancient and unpopular. A few months or perhaps years later, you too will be appalled at the state of the programming world, while those around you will consider you the proverbial 10x programmer, or perhaps a visionary, if you choose the losing (“regression to the mean” is a bitch[1]) battle of sharing your findings with those around you.

In writing this book, I’m not kidding myself that I may have an impact on the masses. My main goal is to give some structural support and an actionable plan to those that have already noticed that the state of the programming world is sad, that they can do much better, but don’t quite know where to start. I’ve been repeating many of the things and themes in this book when mentoring programmers at my workplace, and repeating myself got tiring, so writing these things down made sense. And if I’m going to write them down, might as well attempt to deliver them to those who may benefit from them.

Next: The Approach ⇒

[1] I assume you googled “regression to the mean” if you didn’t know what it meant, and will do so for all other unknown terms and ideas.