Week 1 of CS448 I was assigned to read Chapters 1 & 2 of the book, The Clean Coder. A quick summary and my thoughts on both of the chapters:
Chapter 1 discussed what it means to be a professional and some ways to achieve be one. A huge point the chapter touched on is that a professional takes responsibilty for his or her mistakes. An example the chapter gave was, a nonprofessional who allows a bug to slip through to the product delivered to a customer would shrug it off and move on. A professional on the other hand would be writing a company check for $10,000. Some of the major points that the chapter gave to developers that stuck out to me were; they should be testing every single line of their code, they should always make sure to test the whole system before shipping it to a customer (not just the features recently fixed), and that they should be keeping up to date with all of the latest stuff.
Chapter 2 discussed how you should say “no” to a manager, boss or even a customer in the workplace. The chapter went through and gave different scenarios, using dialogue, where someone was asked to have a certain task done by a certain time, which just simply wasn’t possible. A good tip that the chapter gives is that you should never lie boss just because you cannot get done what he/she wants in time. You need to be assertive and let them know respectfully that you will need more time, and what you CAN have done by that time. In one example in this chapter, a woman named Paula is asked by her manager Mike to be done with the work in 6 weeks. Paula tells him over and over again that the team will need atleast 8 weeks and there is no way they have it done sooner. After going back and forth a few times, Mike says “OK, Paula, but I bet you guys can work miracles if you try.” Mike basically wasn’t taking no for an answer. He went on to promise the customer that they will have the demo in 6 weeks. That was an example of the wrong thing to do on Mikes part. You should NEVER make a false promise and tell someone you will have something done for them if you can’t.
My initial thoughts when beginning the reading was that I was a little bit relieved. This book isn’t your average boring text book, which was I was expecting it to be. It’s actually a pretty easy and interesting read. The book engages the reader and explains things in a way that you can relate to. Chapter 1 was interesting to me because I never really thought of the term “professional” in the context they described it as. I just thought if you are in the workplace .. you are considered a professional. However, I learned that this is not the case at all. There is a lot that goes into be professional, and chapter 1 opened my eyes to that. Chapter 2 was my favorite of the two. I personally have had the problem where I didn’t know how to tell my manager I couldn’t get something done in time. In the past I have just said, “Ok, I will have it done”, then last minute broke the news even though I knew from the start I couldn’t do it. I will definitely use what this chapter taught me in the future and say no the right way. Overall, I enjoyed reading this book for week 1!
From the blog CS@Worcester – Alex's Comp Sci Blog by alexsblog13 and used with permission of the author. All other rights reserved by the author.
