One of my favorite bloggers is Jeff Atwood, and his Coding Horrors blog (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/). Why? He’s passionate not just for code, but for coding.
I see a lot of people who are good at writing code. They know the syntax, can knock out some code, and get the application completed. Then there are people like Atwood, Steve McConnell, Paul Sheriff or Carl Franklin. These guys are passionate about the process of writing code.
When I speak of process, I’m talking about more than just writing, but the design of the code, how much reuse can you achieve from your existing components, do you do test driven development, waterfall, how often do you have code reviews, and more. This is the stuff that doesn’t help you write code, it helps you write better code.
Yesterday I had a root canal. I spent more than three hours in the dentists chair. Since there wasn’t much opportunity for stimulating conversation, I brought along my PDA and listened to some old DotNetRocks (http://www.dotnetrocks.com) episodes. In one of the episodes (http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=104) Carl and Richard were interviewing Paul Sheriff on architecture.
During this episode, somewhere between the root canal and fitting a new crown, I realized that the coders who are passionate tend to also be architects, whether they realize it or not. They care about things like code reuse, good design, and adhering to standards.
If you are interested in learning more about architecture, I would recommend taking a look at the Patterns and Practices libraries at Microsoft. (http://msdn.microsoft.com/practices/). This is a collection of tools, e-books, and articles designed to not only recommend ways to architect your code, but the tools to get it done. Be sure to check out the “Getting Started” link on the upper left, it’s a good place get started on the road to not getting the job done, but getting the job done right.
Arcane Code 