This morning I was reading a post by Jeff Atwood about Mike Gunderloy switching away from Microsoft. Jeff says:

Still, his [Mike Grunderloy's] attitude frustrates me, because it falls so egregiously into the stereotypical, religious love/hate dichotomy that I’ve observed again and again in software developers. You either love Microsoft and use exclusively Microsoft products, or you hate Microsoft, and you vow never to use any of their products ever again. There’s nothing in between. No middle ground.

This is something I too see all the time. People take their choice of development platform incredibly seriously. Personally, I’ve not seen too much positive Microsoft love, in my life I’ve been more exposed people with a blind and all consuming love elsewhere. More specifically, I’ve been exposed to Java Zealot’s who will not, under any circumstances, accept that anything other than Java is the solution to their problem. I’ve been exposed to Java developers who are Microsoft haters, and Microsoft haters who are not Java developers also. But overridingly, the zeolotry I’ve seen has been for Java.

My professional work has had a predominately Microsoft bias. I’ve ended up for whatever reason falling into teams using Microsoft tools and products to build solutions. My non-professional work on the other hand has had the opposite bias. I’ve tended towards Open Source languages and tools such as PHP and other scripting languages. I’ve used Delphi heavily. And when I have been using Microsoft languages (mostly scripting), I’ve been using non-Microsoft products to write the code (namely Ultraedit).

I’ve even written Java.

I’ve found this to be a huge advantage to me in my career.

Each language I learn, each tool I use, comes with further knowledge and appreciation of the art of programming. Each new language that appears is designed to solve a perceived problem with a pre-existing language, and so comes with a new development ethos.

As language and platform are a religion for so many developers, the communities round these platforms become isolated and insular. There is little cross-pollination of ideas and techniques between these communities. In biological terms, this limits the evolution and growth of development. It’s gene pool is kept artificially shallow.

I’m driven by a deep interest in programming. I love to pick up new tools and new ideas. I find that every time I learn a new language, I find new approaches to common problems, that could work in a number of other languages that I am fluent in. And then I try and take these ideas and use them outside of their spawning ground.

Looking at some of the endorsements I’ve had provided on my LinkedIn profile from ex-colleagues, it’s not just my perception that this has been good for me. Other people have seen the benefits I’ve given previous companies from this breadth of knowledge. I can think outside the box in any language, because I know so many languages. For example, this quote was from one of the senior technical architects in the Java division of my company, a division that I only directly worked with once however, provided input to many times:

“Mike is a very skilled and highly professional developer. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Mike’s work is the sheer number of languages and technologies Mike knows to a professional standard - no doubt a consequence of Mike’s eagerness to take on, and complete, new challenges which others may shy away from. Mike’s breadth of knowledge makes him a great asset to have around as he is very approachable and will find time to share his expertise with his colleagues.”

As Jeff says:

As a software developer, you’re doing yourself a disservice by pledging allegiance to anything other than yourself and your craft– whether it’s Microsoft or the principle of free software. Stop with the us vs. them mentality. Let go of the partisanship. We’re all in this thing together.

I’m a pragmatist. For now, I choose to live in the Microsoft universe. But that doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of how the other half lives. There’s always more than one way to do it, and just because I chose one particular way doesn’t make it the right way– or even a particularly good way. Choosing to be provincial and insular is a sure-fire path to ignorance. Learn how the other half lives. Get to know some developers who don’t live in the exact same world you do. Find out what tools they’re using, and why.

It is your duty to yourself, your company, your colleagues and most of all your career to keep your eyes on the alternatives. Don’t start to feel safe that you’ve made the best choice. Pick up other languages as they become of interest, use them in anger, understand why the Ruby way of doing something is different to the Java way, the .NET way and the Visual Basic way. Take that knowledge, absorb it, and re-use it in other languages, on other projects.

Unless you are happy to be a day coder, you need to do this. If you are serious about being a real programmer, and being all that you can be as a developer. You must have breadth. You must get away from the us-and-them, the religion, the I’ve chosen the right tool, yours sucks attitude.

You must understand programming as an art, not just the particular paintbrush that was shoved in your hand. If you don’t have the time or the passion to pick up and code in other languages, at least read blogs about them. Follow the design and issues that surround using that language. Keep yourself open to the new ideas.

It will make a huge difference

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I’ve been doing a lot of DIY lately, after we had some building work done. Painting walls, laying new flooring, putting on new skirting boards, putting up new blinds and curtain rails. I’m not very practical, so my Father-in-Law is usually drafted in to help. One thing has become abundantly clear.

It’s all about having the right tools.

About 6 years ago when we moved into this house we turned the old owner’s kids bedroom into a grown up guest room. In the process we put coving up. This involves cutting stuff at 45 degree angles to make corners. When we did the coving, we used a Coving Mitre:

This is an odd shaped bit of plastic which can be layed at various positions on the coving to guide a hand-saw into cutting the right angle. It’s fiddly, and a pain in the ass to be honest. And because you are hand-sawing it’s hard work, and you can’t just nibble a couple of millimetres off. It was a long hard job.

A year or so later, when we put up some Dado Rail in another room my Father-in-Law had bought a Mitre Saw:

This makes it a lot easier to keep the saw in the right position and cut the angles. It clamps the wood in place. It made the job much faster. But it’s still impossible to cut a couple of Millimetres off a slightly too long piece of dado.

Last week, we put up skirting boards. Now my Father-in-Law has bought a Power Mitre Saw:

With this bitch you can do anything. It’s trivial to cut any angle in anything. You can trim a millimetre off the end of a bit of skirting in a second. It makes the job faster and easier.

When we were laying the flooring. My Father-in-Law cracked out his jigsaw and a Square (thing for getting right angles dead straight). Tools I don’t have, I’d have struggled with a big handsaw, a hacksaw and a steel ruler. And it would have taken ages and been crap.

It’s all about having the right tools.

Since this experience, I’ve decided. There is no point in doing a DIY chore without the right tools. And it’s no use going for the cheap-o option (the Coving Mitre) I need to get something decent. The Manual Mitre Saw would have been the best option, balance of cost and utility.

I’ve bought a cordless drill with a set of drill bits and screwdriver bits. I’ve bought a spirit level. I’ve bought a hacksaw and numerous other tools I’ve been doing without. The DIY I’ve been doing since has been much much more productive. I had to assemble some flatpack furniture yesterday. Normally a chore that takes hours and leaves me with hands sore from the screwing in of a million screws.

Yesterday, I used my cordless power drill and a couple of screw driver packs and had everything together in no time at all. Today, I put the curtains and blinds back up. Screwing them in took seconds, and I used the big spirit level with the built in ruler to make sure they’re level and centred on the window. And it took much less time than the blind I put up in our bedroom a couple of years ago, which wasn’t straight.

I still have to get my Father-in-Law round to do something if I’ve not done it before, and to show me what the right tools for the job are. But, my DIY is light years ahead of where it was 6 years ago.

It’s all about the having the right tools and knowing when to use which tool.

This isn’t just true of DIY. Take photography. When it comes to taking pictures of small children, you need the right camera. I’ve got an old 4 megapixel Nikon Coolpix 4300 at the moment. I bought it before my kids were born, and used to take pictures of landscapes on holiday, or us by the pool on holiday. Great camera, lots of control over what it does.

But it’s useless for taking pictures of kids. They don’t stay still looking cute for more than 2 seconds at a time, and the shutterlag on the Coolpix is about 3-4 seconds with a 10 second minimum delay between taking shots. It’s a useless tool for taking pictures of little kids.

It’s not just true of photography and DIY, it’s true of software engineering. Sure, you could write a full blown replacement for Microsoft Office using a command line compiler and notepad. But it would take orders of magnitude more effort than doing so using a rich IDE, powerful debugging tools and suites of standard components.

I know that I’ve said that coding is not like building a house. But, there are things they do share in common, such as the impact of trying to do a quality job in a decent time with the wrong tools.

It’s important that as a programmer, you have the right tools and you use them for the right job. Make sure that you are using the best programming editor for your language, if you aren’t, get the best or as near it as your budget will go. Make sure you have a debugger, profiler, lint tool, test tool. Make sure you have all the tools, and make sure you know how to use them. If you do, you’ll soon be producing better software faster.

If you aren’t, it’s not the right tool, or you’re not using it at the right stage.

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