I was recently reading "Good to Great", which is a little outside my typical book selection, and as I was reading how a company makes the jump from a "good" company to a "great" company I started thinking about how people, specifically me, could make the jump from good or mediocre to great.
One of the points the book brought up, which I'm sure most of us have heard before, is that good, not bad, is the enemy of great. Once we get to good, we tend to stop striving, we get comfortable; lazy.
That got me thinking about the coding I do on the side, and how I choose the coding problems that I worked on. I think that you will agree, not all coding problems are created equal, and I realized that while I was working on several things, often times I was taking on pop-code projects (yes I made up that word). Projects that were simple or more quickly rewarding, but didn't necessarily stretch me as a developer, similar to pop music or soda pop. A project that would be simple to do, and not allow myself much of a chance to explore the theoretical side of computer science.
One can bang out code all day long and never have to even touch a hashtable, or write their own binary tree. In my opinion, banging out code all day is something I could teach my dog to do, or at the very least I expect these kinds of things to be solved in the near future (~20 years) by higher level languages. Just as we write in C++/Perl/etc now, and we can't imagine writing all our code in assembly, I'm sure the next generation will look down on our very verbose languages.
I think in order to stretch oneself as a developer, one should take on problems that you can't solve easily, or that require several iterations to solve. Not only that, but solving a problem you don't know how to solve, it often requires continuous learning.
I'm not sure if I can really explain how to stretch yourself; I'm not good enough to generalize a solution, I can only scramble and reach for ways to do it myself.
To that end, I'm going to try taking on more difficult solutions. Solutions that /require/ that I understand the problem domain and learn about algorithms that are needed for that area.
My current plan is to make a bicycle route for Google maps, that would only use bicycle routes, so it wouldn't suggest trying to ride on interstates or other bicycle un-friendly roads. Not only that, but it would take elevation changes into account.
So far, I've found that Seattle has GIS data available, although its in "shapefile" format, and may not have latitude and longitude information. If I get can retrieve latitude and longitude information, the USGS has a webservice that can give you an elevation based on lat and long.
I'll let you know how it turns out...
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