There's always a beginner in the crowd

Each morning, my RSS reader is full of posts that seem very rudimentary. Absolutely not trying to pick on any one particular post, but there are many of them each day. These are things that you run across when working in a new language or with a new API. These articles strike me as a "here's a puzzle I ran into and here's how the puzzle is solved" type entry.

These used to annoy me. I envisioned a blogger who was so proud of solving a problem that they felt they should share their brilliance with the world. I felt they were trying to announce their advancement from one level of knowledge to the next.

I now realize that that's not the case. People have lots of reasons to post a blog entry. Maybe it's to share an experience, share knowledge, or just (like in my case) to vent.

But the best thing these entries do is remind other developers of the basics. Sure, these are valuable to beginners, but we're all, in one way or another, beginners. Programming has so many back alleys and dark corners that no one is an expert. Sure, maybe you're very knowledgable about Java concurrency, or the latest scripting language, or . . . whatever. But there's a lot of stuff you don't know (and if you deny it, you're so oblivious to reality that you are probably dangerous to your clients well being).

There are professional developers working every day that completely overlook (or ignore, or forget) the basics. Because we work with multiple languages, it's pretty easy to forget the language specific shortcuts or optimitazations that each language offers. There are highly paid developers with many years of experience who do not use version control, unit testing and similar strategies that most of us take for granted (I swear this is true - I've seen it with my own two eyes). If you're a developer with a lot of experience, don't discount the ideas and discoveries that the newbie at the desk next to you, or the blogger that got stuck in your RSS feed, is so excited about -- there's a chance she's found something of value that you've overlooked.