A Real Programmer?

“I’m not one of these younger guys who don’t really know anything. I’m an older guy, a real programmer with real experience.” So those weren’t his exact words, I’m paraphrasing from memory, but it contains the basic idea he was expressing. I over heard this from the cube next to me while I was eating lunch. Honestly, I was pretty shocked to hear someone say this. While experience does make one a better programmer, I actually haven’t noticed that much of a quality difference between the younger programmers and the older programmers. In fact, the most talented programmer I’ve met at work is 27. It almost seems like programming skill grows logarithmically. You learn and a lot in the beginning, but then as you get more experienced, the skills you pick up only make you slightly better over all. And people who aren’t that great after a year or two, never really become that great.

So hearing some old guy go on and on about himself while bashing on the younger guys sort of ruffled my feathers. Since I had been pretty busy running around all over the place, I wasn’t at my cube but at a “general use” cube (so to speak), so I didn’t know who sat in this area. I was just kind of by myself, eating a sandwich and surfing the web. The voice sounded familiar though. The man continued to trumpet his own skill and put down the “less experienced” when I suddenly realized who he was.

I had actually spent the whole previous day fixing his mangled software. He hadn’t been able to get it to work, even after a 2 week extension, and he had now moved onto another project, so his work had been tasked to me. And I, a younger and “less experienced” programmer, had done what he could not do, and in a day, and now here he was bashing on the younger guys. I was actually pretty annoyed. Even if he had been a good programmer I would have been annoyed. I’m by far the youngest person on my team (by at least 8 years) so part of me had to wonder if he was thinking about me while he gave this little speech. He may have just been trying to talk himself up to his new boss, but what he was saying was still BS.

Anyway, I had enough sense not to interrupt his diatribe or let him know I was around, but I did file it into the back of my mind. Hopefully when I’m 40+ I don’t have an arrogant streak where I go around thinking I’m better just because I’m older, especially if it leaves me blind to my own incompetence.

Image Color Palette Generator Update

I’ve thrown in the towel and done away with the image uploading. The new Color Palette App simply wasn’t being consistent in what it could handle. The ability to upload an image is extremely useful to the user, but since I’m currently under shared hosting (ie, lots of other sites are hosted on the same server), I apparently don’t really have the horse power to handle some of the more heavy duty stuff.

The app is now set up to take in a URL to an image. This shields me from having to worry about people uploading unsavory content (though for safety reasons the app was deleting all images after they had been processed) and it keeps the user from having to worry about me spying on what they upload (something some webmasters do – always be careful about what you upload to websites).

In the future I definitely want to have apps that take in images from a user’s computer, so eventually this issue will be worked out. Anyway, for the time being you can check out the new version of the app here. If it dies on you let me know. This has sort of thrown a wrench in my plans for more image oriented apps, however, I’m still going to charge on and see if I can make the best of this. If worse comes to worse, I’ll just make C# versions.

Oh! And before I forget, I changed the formula for calculating the complimentary colors. I now convert the color space from RGB (red, green, blue) to HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) and then shift the hue by 180 degrees, then I convert back to RGB space. This appears to give much more accurate complimentary colors, though I’m not sure if this is the correct way of doing it. I still cannot find a proper formula for calculating them.

New Blogs

chicanerous – Chicanerous is the author of the popular VB Array Tutorial on this site. And I do mean popular, it now averages over 200 visitors a day. Chic also used to be a regular contributor to a message board I once had. On his blog he says he’ll “probably post poorly written proofs, unastounding thoughts on literature and criticism, overgeneralized musings on strength training and conditioning, and half-hearted ruminations on various other subjects.” Chic’s a cool guy so you should check his site out. Hopefully he doesn’t mind me spamming it here :P.