As preparation for a one-on-one this week with one of the facilitators, I was wondering if I was really getting better as a programmer, by doing what I am doing.

I have heard at numerous places that reading and reflection are keys to getting better. I feel like I haven’t been giving these things much attention in the past couple of weeks. I don’t catch up on reading all the awesome reading material shared on Zulip and I switched from writing this blog post first thing in the morning, to any-time-after-lunch. I don’t think this worked out very well. Writing the post worked as a way to reflect on what I had done yesterday, and what I should be doing today. So, I am back to writing the blog post, first thing in the morning!

Yesterday, I worked on indexing the Python sources in a way that the inspection code can look up, later. During this process, I found that my code to use libclang’s AST wasn’t generic enough, and I had to clean it up to be able to extract useful information from any file in the cpython sources.

We also got to attend a super-awesome talk by Steve Labnik! He talked about his progression from being an application developer, to writing libraries, to working on languages (as a professional developer). He made a lot of interesting and inspiring points during his talk. Some of those that stuck with me are:

• None of these is particularly harder than any of the other. Depending on each person’s personality, or the way their brain works, they are good at doing one or the other.
• Getting good at programming is a matter of showing up, more than about the “genes”. He repeated quite a few times that he disliked the idea of “baby hacker”, and left out the story of his childhood and college programming days! I’m totally stealing his idea of meeting every saturday at 1pm, with a bunch of friends and working until it was 10pm or so, when they could get cheap beer and food! And he did this all through his college! It is interesting that this idea is so similar to Hacker School!

It was a very enjoyable and inspiring talk on the whole.

The plan for today is to actually have the parsed information dumped into some persistent format, and modify the inspect code to actually use it.

I will also be pairing with Kyle for a few hours on working through some of http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/audio-programming-book