"The Best Programming Advice I Ever Got" with Michael Hartl
Name
Michael Hartl
Job Experience:
Entrepreneur
Most Notable Achievement:
Author of the Ruby on Rails Tutorial
Most Frequently Used Programming Language:
Ruby
Advice:
Random weird things happen all the time when programming, and the only way to win is to suck it up and persevere. When I taught computational physics at Caltech, I told my students that they would be saying, "This doesn't make any sense!" with alarming frequency—a prediction that proved correct. Many readers of the Rails Tutorial offer similar stories, often relating their travails with installation, configuration, and debugging. Whenever anyone says, "I spent a day debugging a problem that turned out to be a typo on one line," I think, "Welcome to the club!" If you've never blown a day just trying to install some simple package or debugging some simple issue, you either haven't been programming very long, or you're a lot luckier than I am.