Over years of working as a programmer and mentoring programmers, I found myself repeating much of what I said, so in the industry-standard "do not repeat" style, I figured I should compile this advice into some kind of document. The original intent was to make it into an ebook and publish it, but part of the way through the writing, my role moved away from mentoring, deeper into framework development, and as a result I lost the "fuel" that was driving the writing of the book.
A few years passed, and the world seems to be moving towards "let's just get AI to generate a bunch of code, and see how we can glue it all together". In a sense, we seem to be giving up the engine that got us this far — abstraction, and its power to to write less code to do more, and instead settling for the power of unlimited "outsourcing" to AI. Maybe it won't happen wholesale, with AI writing all of our code, and instead we end up somewhere in the middle — semi-intelligent humans producing mediocre code with the help of AI.
And then there's the whole problem of "people don't read anymore". Even "respectable" companies publish their "documentation" in video format, which is a really disturbing trend — are we headed towards the world where modern humans can learn only when force-fed content, as opposed to reading and thinking at their own pace?
If that wasn't enough, there's also the whole "who needs authors, AI can write everything" trend. What am I, measly human, doing by actually writing prose in this day and age?
Either way, the direction of the industry and perhaps humanity in general makes me think that there's a good chance that "advice on going from decent to great as a programmer" is no longer useful. But I would love to be wrong about this, and since lots of content is already written, I figured that I have nothing to lose by releasing it to the public, and seeing if the SEO gods will match it to some eyeballs, hopefully ones connected to intelligent, still pliable, brains.
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