Becoming a great programmer

How exactly does one becomes a great programmer?

I mean, can you become one or are you born that way? I remember going through high school and college hanging out in the computer lab, trying to do my own stuff; I kept envying the programming stars. No matter what I did, they were doing things that were at least 10 times more complicated and 20 times cooler! I had just learned C or Pascal by myself only to discover that they had know those languages for years and were working on tapping into the interrupt system of the OS to make a mouse cursor move on the screen. I had just learned photon mapping only to realize that they had already programmed their own C compiler.

Sheesh...

It is very disheartening to see other people learn faster than you and it really forces me to think about how I'm going about becoming great at what I do. I don't have any answers right now aside from reading more books, analyzing subjects like "what is the best way to use Linq" and post them here.

Oh well, I just felt like ranting a bit.

When corporations sell their soul

There has been a lot of online talk lately concerning Starbucks having lost it's soul. The offender? The Two-Buck repeat drink. Granted, once you start competing for the lowest price your soul has been sold long ago. But what really did it for me was when I found out that all Starbucks were using automated machines to pull espresso shots instead of the La Marzocco they used before. They took a craft and automated it to the point where a monkey can pull as good a shot as a twenty year veteran barista.

The goal of all this is to streamline your product and make it impossible to differentiate from the same product at another location. McDonald's does this perfectly; a Big Mac will taste the same at every hour of the day at any McDonald's on the planet. But is this a good thing for Starbucks?

The main idea behind roasting their coffee beans to the point of burning them and automating the espresso shots is to provide consistency to the customer. The burnt beans will taste the same year after year even when different meteorological and environmental factors have influence the taste profile of the bean. The automated espresso shots will then yield a constant, boring product that will never be great, but also never horrible. However, the price you pay as a customer is that you will never get a remarkable drink at Starbucks without having the barista (who is just a technician, not a craftsman) pour insane amounts of sugary syrups in your drink.

On the other hand, a barista that uses standard semi-manual espresso machines, tamps his own coffee and is allowed to play with brewing temperatures and coffee grinds adjustments will be able to provide you with the most succulent and mind blowing espresso drink that the quality of his beans will allow him to make. The downside? He might miss his shot and give you something that is either tasteless, bitter or even worse, sour. The trained barista, though, will give you more amazing shots as they get more experienced and eventually never pour a bad shot... ever. Plus, any respectable coffee shop will throw away a bad shot and pull a new one. After all, it'll only cost the company 1/30th of a pound of coffee beans to do that.

This is were, in my opinion, Starbucks lost it's soul. They don't like to pour extra shots. When you have that many locations, all those extra shots add up. On top of that, they have to pay their skilled barista a lot more to prevent them from leaving. Buy purchasing automated machines (at the cost of thousands of dollars per machine) for all their location, they indicated that it was cheaper for them to do so than to provide us with great coffee all the time. Gone were the days were coffee tasted good at Starbucks.

Wine and fine cuisine

Could you imagine winemakers doing the same thing? They could let their grapes over-mature every year in the hopes that every bottle, every year, will taste the same. No more saying that 2001 or 2002 was such a great year. Now, there is no difference. Or they could invent a machine that takes those over ripped grapes as an input and spits out bottled wine at the other end. Think of all the money they'd save! No more lost batches, no over fermentation, the same alcohol content, the same flavors in every bottle! The year was humid, dry, hot or cold? No worries, the wine will taste the same.

No more wine experts. No more wine encyclopedias. No more wine collectors. No more satisfaction in drinking what you know is a good bottle of wine.

What about fine cuisine? Well, you get something like Olive Garden, a so-called Italian restaurant that serves food that is created and concocted in a central location and shipped to the restaurants, who mainly reheat it and serve it to you. The bread sticks will taste the same from location to location, the Alfredo sauce will not make you go crazy with delight; it'll simply be O.K., just average. No chef is going to prepare something amazing. Your food will never be awesome. It'll just never be bad. The only thing is that you might get that freezer taste in your chicken every now and then. Where did you think they get their chicken breasts from? The grocery store? Local producers? It's all about making it easy for the cooks to prepare your food. Same size and same weight chicken breasts take the same amount of time to cook. There is no need anymore for a chef that knows instinctively how to adapt to different situations. A college student at minimum salary can do a good job at cooking that chicken.

No creativity allowed

Just like Starbucks and Olive Garden love consistency at the price of greatness, other companies do the same at that price of stiffling creativity. Not all hope is lost though, I thought a couple years ago, when I read about a baking franchise that allowed their franchisee to experiment and create new products on their own! They only required that the new location follow the rules for the first year of operations. After that, it could do whatever it pleased. That resulted in a huge number of bakeries refining processes, business systems and creating new products. The parent company would then pay, once a year, to have franchisees come over and share their knowledge with one another in an effort to spread what works and make everybody better! Basic evolution principles! Instead of having a centralized office where upper management decides what you want to eat or drink based on focus groups and wide-area surveys, the ideas come from the ground; from the customer; from you! That resulted in a bakery that has adapted to the local culture and provides what people want in that region, not an average product that is designed to please the biggest number of Americans.

The soul is key

In my mind, the soul is the key to the quality of a product. Without the sweat and expertise that goes into the creation of a product, that product will never be great. Tomatoes sold by local farmers always taste better and fresh made pasta tastes amazing when the dough was made fresh the same day. There is just no going around it. The sould of these items is what makes our days better, and in the long run, we live a happier and healthier life because of it.

Financial Armageddon?

Really? Is it this bad?

Michael J. Panzner(here's a link to his blog) would like to make us think so in his book: Financial Armageddon, where he predicts the unraveling of our economy and years of misery. I'll be honest with you; I haven't read the whole book. I was at Barnes And Nobles the other night and this book was sitting on the shelf, looking really interesting. I picked it up and flipped and read through a couple pages, focusing especially the ones about how to protect yourself against this economic collapse.

Even if you believe that the times are good and that we are all safe, it is still important to know what to do in case something bad happens. Just in case. Knowledge never hurts, right? Well I'm trying really hard to use my own judgement and to further my own knowledge in order to make my own opinion on the matter. With a family to support, I have to stay on top of things. And what better way to think about a subject than sitting down and writing about it?

A potential economic disaster

Panzner presents two main problematic periods and how to defend yourself against them. He argues that we will first enter a deflationary period where prices everywhere will be falling because of a lack of demand. In such a case, the best is to be debt free. If you still owe money to lending institutions, your monthly payments won't change, but your income will probably go down, making it harder to make ends meet. Hanging on to cash will be the best thing to do since it's purchasing power will go up daily. Hopefully you have an emergency fund!

Eventually, the government will try to stimulate the economy by injecting massive amounts of cash in the system, thus diluting its value. Cash being plentiful again will make prices go up. And with other countries trying to get rid of their US dollar reserves, our dollar will be worthless pretty quickly. A period of hyperinflation will ensue, where prices go up in general by 50% every month! In this case, the best defense is to spend your cash AS SOON as possible to buy necessities like food and gas, but also assets who's value tends to follow inflation, like a house, or maybe gold if it remains evaluated in US dollars.

Will this really happen?

I don't know. The United States government hasn't helped the situation, to be sure. I mean, the deficit is at an all time high and the dollar at an all time low. Asian countries hold us by the balls because they own such a huge stockpile of US currency; all they have to do to bring us down is spend those dollars on US assets and flood the market with cash, which will trigger an inflationary period. This is what happened in Germany after the first world war. Germany printed money to pay off their debt. Angry, the lenders took the money and spent it inside the country. There was so much money going around that people would burn stacks of bills because it would burn for a longer time than the wood they could buy it with. Yeah, we don't want that happening here.

With more and more banking institutions like Bear Stearn, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac going down, we can only hope that the bleeding will eventually stop. On top of all of this, gas and food prices keep going up, which reduces our consumption, and the gross domestic product hasn't grown that much recently (1.9% in the 2nd quarter of this year.)

And to top it all, our entire economy is based on debt when it used to be based on gold reserves. With credit having dried up and with it the means to create debt, it will be harder to help the economy recover. This amounts to what certain people are calling The Perfect Storm and God knows what will happen. Financial armageddon, another great depression or just a small recession? Nobody can know. But if you prepare for the worst and hope for the best, your chances of surviving the next couple years will be greatly increased.

Personally, I think the word "armageddon" is slightly sensationalist and exaggerated.