How to recognise a good programmer?

Daniel has written a really great article about how to recognize good programmers. Here is a summary of the traits (I have marked the ones that I truly relate with, and added my comments):

Positive indicators:

• Passionate about technology
• Programs as a hobby
• Will talk your ear off on a technical subject if encouraged [Mukul: This is an absolute necessity to identify a "hacker". They are so passionate about what they do that they will talk about it for more time than you want them to. I love this feature.]
  
• Significant (and often numerous) personal side-projects over the years
• Learns new technologies on his/her own
• Opinionated about which technologies are better for various usages [Mukul: I have seen some of the technical guys getting upset when you tell them do use a certain technology or tell them to do things in a certain way - this is good. They should be opinionated.]
  
• Very uncomfortable about the idea of working with a technology he doesn’t believe to be “right”
• Clearly smart, can have great conversations on a variety of topics
• Started programming long before university/work
• Has some hidden “icebergs”, large personal projects under the CV radar
• Knowledge of a large variety of unrelated technologies (may not be on CV)

Negative indicators:

• Programming is a day job
• Don’t really want to “talk shop”, even when encouraged to
• Learns new technologies in company-sponsored courses
• Happy to work with whatever technology you’ve picked, “all technologies are good”
• Doesn’t seem too smart
• Started programming at university
• All programming experience is on the CV
• Focused mainly on one or two technology stacks (e.g. everything to do with developing a java application), with no experience outside of it

Read the full article here.

Simple Tooltip

http://codeeazy.com/mktooltip/

I wanted a tooltip implementation for my web page, and was looking around. I looked a number of open-source options (see 40 tooltip scripts here and 20 here) and one commercial library. I liked the functionality however each of them was 7, 8, 10 or 25 KB in size, which I thought was too much to implement just a simple tooltip. So, I thought how about I write a tooltip library myself.

Here is an implementation, check it out at http://codeeazy.com/mktooltip/. I implemented this in 818 bytes of code, and about an hour of coding. So one would think, there must be something wrong. Well, it works. And is cool!

CodeEazy - solving problems, Simply! - Launching my other blog

Anand and I have been talking about this blog for a while, there was just no time to write about some of our inner feelings about - coding. So today we launched our other blog - CodeEazy.

We have been working on, what many people would call “the most bleeding edge” technology at Komli. To give a little bit of background, we are the founding engineers at Komli. Komli is an early stage startup. Since last November we have been learning some very cool techniques of solving problems. When it comes to building a product, a typical engineering mindset, lots of times gets stuck in technical jargons, technical-coolness and sometimes religious-warfare between different technical solutions, languages etc. While, the most important thing when you are building a product is – to solve a problem. That’s it. You have to solve a problem, apply any technology, apply any language, apply any tool, use two languages or 3 languages – you gotta solve the problem. While, I obviously, am against making code unreadable or un-maintainable, and therefore mixing technologies or languages may be a no-no in some cases, however engineers mostly overdo that, by applying that rule too strictly, therefore loosing focus on – solving the problem; you gotta solve the problem, that’s the most important thing.

We have been solving numerous problems, in a number of areas, and sometimes in very cool ways.

We would use this blog to tell you about some of the cool ways of solving complex problems in simple ways. Some of what we have learnt. Some hard-learnt-lessons. I hope that you will like it.