All things programming is a part of hackery to me. I love to hack stuffs and that’s what has pulled me into the planet of development and engineering. From my observation, some people miss the point on what programming is about.
Some see it as a tag to their beings like “Jake the Java Programmer”. What’s that? It doesn’t look reasonable to me. Not because I’m not a Java programmer but because it just isn’t right.
Well, Someone could call me a Python programmer because I love writing stuffs in Python or a PHP programmer because PHP is what they see me do most often. However, I wouldn’t tag myself with any of those because my objective as a programmer is not just to get lauded with a programming language but to create solutions.
If we’re creating solutions then we can’t be stuck with a tool. The SEALS use guns and grenades but when all that’s left is wood, they use it to defeat their enemies.
Why can’t all programmers think this way? You shouldn’t get so obsessed with a language that you want to tag yourself with it alone for the rest of your life.
I’m a good Python programmer and a better PHP developer. I also started working with Ruby lately and I’ve been able to play around with Rails.
According to Google philosophy, it’s best to do one thing really well. I am in total compliance to this. However, doing one thing really well doesn’t mean you should be stuck to that one thing. Google is popularly known as a search engine and they are the best at it. They go as far as providing search maps and a lot of search filters. But they are not stuck to this. Google also owns gPlus, they own YouTube, they own Android, they recently released a prototype for a Self-driving Car.
Do not misinterpret the message! Be good at what you do, but learn to do other things and do not be stuck on one.