The journey of a programmer

Why would anyone want to be a programmer?

It's a career path that can be awesome if you have the skill, but mediocre at best if you don't. It can be more challenging than you have ever imagined but it's these same challenges that provide the motivation for you to hone your skills and become truly awesome at being a programmer. So why would anyone want to be a programmer? Why would a person persue sports, or arts or dancing or singing? It's a passion. If you're in it just for the money, you may not do as well as the other guy who is in it for the fun.

The key step in beginning the programming journey

Contrary to what people might believe, being a programmer doesn't start with writing a line of code. In fact in most university courses, code writing is secondary. What really makes you a programmer is logical thinking and problem solving. These things can also make you a really good chess player incidentally. In my 10 years of programming, I've seen lots of persons struggle with it, and the main reason is often because they're too focused on code that on thinking. I've learned a few languages over the years and most of them have enough differences to make you read a few pages of documentation or google a function to capitalize the first letter of a word or sentence. Regardless of the functions/methods/procedures/syntax the underlying logical thought process/problem solving remains the same.

This might be different from the conventional advice your receive, but if you want to be a good programmer become a chess player (becoming a good chess player isn't easy, but it will get you thinking the right way, I still lose sometimes to the Easy AI).

Programming applies to more that just programming

Writing code and programming will likely earn you enough money to buy food, a house, a few cars maybe and some cool gadgets. Don't just leave the principles and logical thinking when programming but try to apply the same problem solving steps to life. Think before you act...you know that hastily putting in a piece of code may break an application and create more problems....then why would you hastily decide to do something that can possibly have harmful consequences.

One wise guy (in a movie) once said, only the journey is written not the destination.

I don't know why I inculded that but it seemed right to make some philosophical statement. Anyways what I was trying to say is start the programming journey the right way and you will arrive the destination you want. You have to decide which road to travel, which language to focus on and how much of your sanity you want to lose.

The bottom line....it's in your hands to become an awesome....and probably wealthy programmer if you know how to play chess properly.

While you learn to play chess and program, you can check out http://worldofavalon.net It's my personal programming project that I started while attending university.