Things I Learned as a Professional from Technical Blogs

日本語はこちら。

This blog post is about the things I've learned from reading technical blogs back when I started programming in real settings (university research projects, internships and professional jobs). It was insipired by this podcast episode.
The quote from the podcast that inspired me to write this post is:

And the way I learned it, actually, wasn’t necessarily through Derek and that job as much as through these online blogs, these RSS feeds that I subscribed to and read during the day. These were the blogs of people like Jeff Atwood and Martin Fowler and Eric Sink and Paul Graham and Joel Spolsky and so many others that they filled up my Bloglines reader.

(I highly recommend listening to the whole podcast, it was really good.)

This experience really resonated with me. I've been a avid blog reader ever since I knew about blogs. I subscribe to over 100 blogs and check them daily (100+ is probably too many and I need to revisit my list but that's another story😅).
There's so much I've learned from reading all the well written blog posts and feel like it serves a base of how I treat my work as a professional. As with any job, technical skills are very important but something that is equally important is how you think your work.

This blog post will be about some of the things I've learned from reading these blogs.

Just Do It

This one is from a blog post called "Getting Things Done When You’re Only a Grunt – Joel on Software" by the very famous Joel Spolsky.
This is just one part of the long post but I feel it boils down to this one quote. You might not be he most important person in the team/company but you can always do things yourself to make things better.

All it takes to benefit from those conventions is a little old-fashioned discipline. And if it doesn't start with you, then who?

This is from another of my favourite blogs Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood. This one is from a post called "Discipline Makes Strong Developers". The post links to another blog post by Scott Koon (the original seems to have been lost) where the author talks about how the single, simple trait of discipline can make or break a project. The post by Jeff Atwood gives the same advice with an example of how every team should use version control.
This really resonated with me and I try to be disciplined when coding and also expect others to do the same.

Always have room even during the hardest times

This one is from a Japanese blogger @konifar in his blog post titled, "こんな風になりたいと感じる大人の振る舞い（Habits You Want to Copy as a Grown-up" (yes sorry it's in Japanese). It's a summary of the key takeaways he got watching an anime. The other takeaways are all good and I recommend people read it. The one in the title has stuck with me most. During your career, there will be many, many tough times where you feel like everything is closing down on you. These are the times that you need to keep calm. Panic never brings progress.

It’s important to remember that when you start from scratch there is absolutely no reason to believe that you are going to do a better job than you did the first time.

Again from Joel's blog "Things You Should Never Do, Part I – Joel on Software". This says that the urge to rewrite something from scratch tends to be a bad idea as it's likely that you don't fully understand what the original code is doing and you could end up with something worse.
This one has stuck with me for a long time and I also try to avoid rewriting till absolutely necessary.

Enjoy taking risks.

This a quote I got from a blog post called "私がシリコンバレーで学んだ5つの教訓（Five Things I learned from Silicon Valley）" by Kazutoshi Ono (@lalha2). One the best CTOs in Japan I admire much.
Software engineers tend to be risk averse. We don't like ambiguity as it tends to lead to problems down the line. However, you cannot always anticipate the future (rather you can never anticipate the future) and there will be times you need to take risks and move forward.

Find a blog you like

I have more examples (and many more that I don't remember) but I hope I've got my point across. There's a lot to learn from the wisdom of other great people. I feel these blogs are more general and do not age. All the points made above are equally valid today.
I recommend finding your own favourite blogs and try to read them. I assure you there will be a lot to learn from and they will pay off in the long run.

P.S.
A lot of the links above are in HTTP (not HTTPS). I had to click the ok button in Firefox each I open the site. Shows my age😅.