My Interview with a Developer!!

I’m taking the great class about programming for non-programmers and as homework I get to intervew 2 Developers… here goes developer number one…Robert!

Robert learned to code years ago in college as he was in for a CS and electrical engineering degree. He’s been a chip designer for most of his career, but a large portion of what they do is write code the designs the chips we all use in our pc’s, Iphones. etc.

For 1st time coders Robert suggests paying attention to the structure of your code first, then begin to right code, not the other way around. The advantages of this are your code will be easier to read by someone else, it will help you separate out what you need to code and how to code it. It also helps you think about keeping your code modular so its easier to maintain, update and can be redused by other code.

Robert would work with a guy like me becasue he says I’m detail orientated and is methodical in my approach. We’ve also worked with eachother before in a startup…where he was the developer and I was the person who solved a problem we had in the industry we were trying to disrupt.

Robert looks for developers with a disciplined approach to problem solving. Also important is being able to collaborate with other coders and persuade them that you have the best way to solving the problem at hand. Having knowledge of what language to choose given the problem to solve is keay and finally, be willing to learn the latest languages, don’t just stay with the first language you used. Tech is always improving itself with better languages, so don’t get left behind.

For me, Robert suggested getting more experience with different languages and with how various coding problems have been approached in the past. Be sure to have the right level of abstraction / modularity in my code…don’t keep thing too flat.