Why blogging again? I am too old for this.

I touched HTML the first time when I was about eight, nine years old in Hong Kong. I am twenty-one now, and I can you that I suck at front-end development. I can barely write any good Javascript function without constantly looking up on Mozilla Developer Network, Stackoverflow or basically, everything from Google. I can't make any HTML layout with HTML or CSS because I just don't have the fundamental skill baked into my head. I tried, but I found them boring. I still do, although I love the enticement when I see that beautiful webpage I created.


Nonetheless, here I am, in my fourth year of computer science degree, I am still picking up so many tools and skills that are considered fundamentals by computer science education standard. The first time I started using version control was when I started working in my lab.

That's about 8 months ago.

I have to admit that in the last eight months I've learned so much that no one was able to teach me in any form. Ask me how to deal with a legacy system and fix bugs as seen? Ask me how to debug a system? Ask me how to become a duck-tape programmer rather than a perfect all-rounded programmer? How to scalable? Understand why testing is important? You have to pick up these things from doing a real project that isn't done under your own blanket.

Recently I watched Google I/O - The Myth of the Genius Programmer and these two Googlers were so damn right about "real genius" are very rare. The point is a good working environment is crucial to success. One interesting part was "don't hide your commits". It's so true that hiding commits are indication of perfections. The only reason why I have to erase the history if my lab work ever get open-sourced is to remove hardcoded credential.

The talk was really funny. I love it. It taught me, or I should say, remind me of who I should become. I admit that I don't like people entering my comfort zone and tell me "you are wrong, stop, stop, stop, you know nothing about X,Y,Z." That hurts because I am so desperate to become a good and skillfull programmer. I want my presentation to have credibility. It is so sad to see "oh wow, it's August and I haven't done much."

Who to blame? What to blame? Me? The new people who came to the lab? Or all the problems I ran into?

Let's not blame. Let's just say I am still learning, and I really need to manage my time better. I mean sleep early and really get to work more, because with school I am going to have less free time to work on everything at once.

Oh by the way, why should I be blogging? I am too old. Because I want to document what I am learning. I always want to make a blog about it, but I always feel so tired to update blog.... let's hope I won't give up, for the last time.