27. April 2008 by Asher.

Ever heard of navel-gazing? Omphaloskepsis? I had not of until Friday morning.

Navel-gazing is, as was described to me, the act of a Buddhist monk staring into his navel trying to figure out the meaning of life. Wikipedia explains it in a very similar way. I’m not even going to ponder the craziness of one looking deep into their own navel as a source of enlightenment, rather I’d like to discuss why I am now blessed with this knowledge.

Friday morning I went to talked to my boss about a program we had been working on Thursday afternoon. I stated that Thursday night I had thought of a better way to accomplish our goal and wanted to run it by him. At this he went into a long rant about not having time to navel-gaze, not gold-plating things and to just do it his way and now.

This concept confuses me, almost everything I’ve read or been told about programming is that a good programmer is one that is always thinking. I have even been told by the President of a Java Shop in Ann Arbor that the biggest reason that sending programming project overseas is due to communication issues causing problems with overseas programmers actually thinking about the specification as opposed to just programming what they are told.

Most of my college education we were not taught how to solve a problem in a specific way, but we were given the tools that could solve the programming problems and the knowledge of how to apply them in various ways. To be more specific we are not just typing monkeys, we are actually paid to be thinking monkeys. (Insane isn’t  it!) It amazes me that someone who has worked in the programming industry so long would not understand this simple fact that makes programming such a difficult thing to do.

However; I continued to think about this problem, discussed it with another member of my team, who agreed with my ideas and was able to accomplish our goals within 30 minutes of programming and testing. Mind you, I had spend 4 hours Thursday afternoon trying to think about how to test the code I was asked to add and couldn’t figure out the best way to do it. (Usually a sign that something is wrong, hence the thinking.)

I think this experience helps me realize how important thinking about the best way to accomplish something is never a bad idea. Thinking about solutions most often leads to a increased knowledge, a better solution and hopefully a quicker solution. So moral of the day: Keep thinking!

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13. April 2008 by Asher.

Hello All! I just decided to start my first blog ever today. For now, I’m just going to use a temporary design provided to me, but over time I would like to change it and make it a lot cooler. So if you have any suggestions for looks, please let me know. I plan on writing mainly about my life with regards to sports, friends, Chicago, programming, technology and any other random sh!t that comes to mind. Thanks all!!

Random Wikipedia Adventure: There is a programming language called D. I haven’t read much about it other than some of what I read on Wikipedia. To me it looks like a cross between C++ and C#, which some other cool features, such as nested functions. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it is still a baby, only being release in Jan ‘07.

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