devel oper .

* 2006 by Sarah George Page 1 of 5

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devel oper . *
What Is A Professional Programmer?
by Sarah George
How do people become professional programmers? Many people go the traditional path
through a computer science or software engineering education and from there into
professional programming work.
Others become professional programmers by accident. A person writes a small
program to help at work, and their workmates say, Oh great, you can write programs!
Youre our programmer now!
Other people start out as hobbyists and follow a less traditional path, not always
getting a degree, but clearly wanting to be programmers from the start and working
actively towards that goal.
Ive been a hobbyist programmer since I was 6. I wasnt writing anything amazing
back then but I had started writing and soon found it was absorbing most of my time. Since
I never really stopped, that gives me 24 years programming experience and counting.
At first I was into writing computer games. Later people asked me to write programs
for them, and sometimes I even got paid. From this I learned that software is always for
something. Programs are not self contained worlds of their own. People expect things out
of a program that have more to do with Japanese or Geophysics or Engineering (or
whatever theyve got in mind) than with how a computer works. I had to learn something
about all those domains in order to write programs for them.
At university it didnt take long before I was a tutor, and thats where I found I enjoy
teaching, and especially enjoy teaching programming.
While I was at university I got my first real job, writing Visual C++ code for a
financial database company. In terms of design and theory it was lightweight stuff. But in
terms of working with others on a large project I was being thrown in the deep end! They
had gigabytes of source code, growing cancerously through the efforts of a dozen
developers of wildly differing skill levels.
In spite of my programming skills being well above average there, I learned to settle
for being a junior programmer, a little fish in a large pond.
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Skipping along a few more jobs and a lot more years, today I am a senior developer in
a small research groupa big fish in a little pond. Ive had to teach my co-workers a lot
about professional programming, because most of them havent been in industry to get
that taste of what large code bases and diverse skill levels do to programs if you arent
using those professional skills to keep everyone pointed in the same direction.
Theres quite a gap between being able to program and being a professional
programmer. It took me 15 years to go from beginner to hotshot programmer, then
another 10 years to go from hotshot to professionaland Im still learning.
Whatever the path we follow, most professional programmers have in common the
fact that they learned to code first and how to be a professional later.
The Meaning of Professional
So what does it mean to be a professional programmer? What does it mean to be a
professional anything? Some definitions simply say to be a professional is to make money
from a skill, but true professionals also have a set of qualities often described as
professionalism. In my opinion, these qualities are: trustworthiness, teamwork,
leadership, communication, constant updating of skills, an interest in minimizing risks and
accountability. Each of these effect the professional programmer in certain ways.
Trustworthiness The concept of trustworthiness applies in several different ways for
programmers. Can you be trusted with a job? To perform a task without someone checking
up on you? Can you be trusted to ask for help when you need it?
If youre given clients data or have signed a non-disclosure agreement, then you are
being trusted to respect privacy. You are trusted to check license agreements on third party
tools or libraries and to get licenses or permission as required. And like any professional
you are trusted to simply do a good job.
Teamwork Will you genuinely cooperate with your team mates? Will you work to mutual
advantage and not just your own? Can you trust your team to work with you? Can you do
your share of the work and trust your team to do the rest? And can you accept your
management (and sometimes even clients) as part of the team, everyone trying to get the
same job done?
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Leadership Showing leadership means both earning respect from others and knowing
what to do with it. Recognize the skills of your team members, and make sure you can offer
each person challenges and development without exceeding what they can cope with at a
given time.
Leadership involves not always getting to do the fun parts of a project yourself (that
scary delegation word). It also involves not asking anyone to do a task that you wouldnt
be willing to do yourself. Its not just the managers and lead programmers who need to
show leadership, its any professional programmer. The best programmers to work with
are the ones that know whats going on, not just their little tasks.
Communication Respecting the people you work with, and your clients, enough to really
listen to them is a critical part of communication. Teamwork cant happen without good
communication, nor can accountability.
Communication is critical for helping clients to produce usable specifications and
feedback. Will you question whether the specs you are given really will serve the purpose
that the client has in mind?
Communication skills help with making meetings timely and effective. A
professionals communication is effective and to the point, whether in person, in email, on
the phone or in written documents.
Documentation at first seems like a programmer-specific concern until you consider
how many people require documentation in a serious project: other programmers need
high level, API level and in-code documentation; managers need planning, progress, and
bug documentation; lawyers need proof of what was done and when; and users need
documentation on how to use the software.
Updating Skills Keeping your skills up to date involves staying aware of whats going on in
your industry. What are the current ideas about methodologies like eXtreme
Programming? What libraries and tools are out there that might support your project?
What are the current refactoring tools? How about standards, file formats and protocols?
Are you up to date with Unicode, XML, SQL, and all the other acronyms? Perhaps youre
missing out on something if youre not. What platforms are your potential clients using?
Should you be learning about cross platform development?
Basically you need to possess a genuine interest in your field, and to read broadly so
you know whats out there and which areas to then read deeply about. You also need to
accept that even (or should I say especially) the very best programmers are still learning.
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Minimizing Risks Familiarity with best practices, combined with a healthy dose of
common sense, will take you a long way towards managing risks. Professional
programmers keep track of known bugs or any other change they intend to make. Bugs are
risks, and a simple database can prevent you having a product ship with bugs youd simply
forgotten.
Another risk thats often not properly considered is any and all changes to the source
code. Source is your livelihood and any change can be a mistake. Theres good software out
there that will keep track of every revision of your source code and even help merge code
that multiple people have changed.
Professional programmers are careful to do enough testing. A software company will
generally have testers but the developers need to know how to get the most out of testers
and also how to write their own unit and regression tests to make sure every change in
behavior is noticed and checked by a human.
Keeping your code simple and well styled is another commonly overlooked way to
manage risks. If anyone can look at the code and see right away what it does, you are far
less likely to find bugs in it later, and you are less likely to have a junior programmer
attempt to change something without understanding it first.
Another risk is the client changing their mind, or more often changing their
specifications because theyve realized it wasnt what they had in mind. Write your code to
be modular and reusable and you wont have any trouble adapting it to changing needs.
Accountabili ty Writing code for others is a responsibility. You need to make sure your
software is reliable. You need to make sure you and the client truly understand the
requirements and specifications. You need to have documentation of your work, all current
and past bugs, your progress, any problems, signed-off milestones, and more. You are also
required to know about some basic legal issues, like software licensing, the terms of your
employment contract, and intellectual property law.
* * *
As you can see, there is a huge gap between coding and professional programming.
Most programming courses focus on the coding side of things, and the professional skills
tend to be glossed over or not covered at all. I have found myself regularly teaching these
skills to new co-workers, which highlighted the need for professionalism skills training.
Teaching my co-workers reminded me how much I enjoy teaching. I decided to teach more
people by trying my hand at professional writing for a change.
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devel oper . * 2006 by Sarah George Page 5 of 5
Original author owns and reserves all future rights. Reprint only with written permission.
I set up a web site, which is completely independent from my day job. The site is
called Devel opi ngPr ogr ammer s. com. It is devoted to teaching people how to develop into
professional programmers. Since founding the site, Ive been presenting the tools and ideas
that I think professionals should know about.
Some of my articles simply refer to other sites of benefit to would-be professionals. I
research other articles from scratch: tutorials, guides, and discussions of things
professionals should be thinking about, like revision control, documentation, keeping your
group pointed in the same directionand of course, each of the aspects of professionalism
that I listed earlier.
These days I consider myself to be a professional programmer, though I am still
discovering the depth and breadth of what exactly that means. Perhaps that ongoing
exploration of programming and of professionalism is what makes this for me a career and
not just a job.
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About the Author
Sarah George lives in Melbourne, Australia, and holds an honors degree in Computer
Science. She has had a range of programming-related jobs, including applied
programming, teaching computer science practical and tutorial classes, and is currently
working as part of an artificial intelligence research team at Monash University. Her web
site, Developing Programmers.com, is aimed at programmers who want to become
more professional about their craft.