Blank page syndrome...

[johnpalmer]

To do:

1) Go bikeriding; you went jogging yesterday and need to rest your knee from impact today

2) Forget that you'll never find any way to prove that you're a competent programmer, so you won't find a programming job, so when you finally lose your job, you'll be unable to find anything because you've wasted all your time trying to study programming

3) Forget about all marriage problems

4) Decide that the answer to 2), above, is to study some networking mixed in with the programming, and remember that you know more about how to learn about programming than you did the last few times you decided to try to become a programmer

5) Decide that the answer to 3) above, doesn't exist at all while depressed, so you need to change your mood before trying to do anything about it.

Comments

[lutonianbill.livejournal.com]

Forget that you'll never find any way to prove that you're a competent programmer

As a programmer myself, are you sure about this? I know that times have moved on, but when I first went to interviews for programming positions I had a dozen published programs under my belt, including a couple I was actually proud of. OK, these days you won't find a magazine willing to print a grubby printout of 16K of BASIC, let alone pay you for it, but a simple freeware or shareware application with your name on it is far easier published nowadays, and more likely to give you the chance to prove "N people thought this was good programming".

Ok, this does lead to the problem of having to think of something that does need programming (hard) - or asking people if they need anything done (easy, and you'll be surprised how many will ask you to do something, although this will usually introduce you to the problem of programming without a proper design or requirements document).

For instance, I want an application that will scan a magazine cover-CD or DVD of freebie/shareware/demo applications, and come up with a simple catalogue of what software is on the disc: and save this so that when I put next month's CD in it will tell me there's a later version, or a bug-fix. I want that catalogue to be searchable so that if, a year later, I want to find all the games I have on cover-disks, I'll be directed to the latest disc for each game, and all updates to that game.

Ok, that takes you into analyst/programmer status instead, but I'd be willing to alpha and beta test it for you, and pay for and recommend it as a good solution when completed. Care to take that challenge on?

Proof of good programming skills is actually quite easy really: references take a bit more effort.