From Good to Great Developer

Last week I watch a presentation called “From good to great developer“ from www.infoq.com.
Here is the link : http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Good-to-Great-Developer-Chris-Hedgate

Chris Hedgate made a really great presentation. He pointed out that good developer writes code quickly but hard to maintain; but great developer has long term goal and try to write clean code and make it easier to maintain.

He also gave the advices how to become a great developer. I really like the 4-stage learning model he introduced: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. The learner in different stage will take different actions: inspiration, training, practice and reflection.


Talking about becoming a great developer, which is the same idea coming from Agile. It means craftsmanship, professionalism, discipline, and mastery. I think every serious developer should have a goal to become a great developer or master programmer, just like kong-fu master or samurai. It is a whole life’s practice.

Being a great developer is not an easy job. You need to understand the agile principles, understand design patterns, have disciplines and patience to write clean codes and keep refactoring; you have to constantly reflect yourself; you need to keep learning new technologies. And you need to help other people and try to motivate and inspire them. This is raising the bar, it is hard, but this is the only way to create a remarkable career for you, the only way to give you a passion, and the only way to transcend yourself.

Here I add some other videos which share the same philosophy:

1. Craftsmanship and Ethics, by Robert Martin:
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/craftmanship-ethics

2. Developing Expertise: Herding Racehorses, Racing Sheep, by Dave Thomas
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Developing-Expertise-Dave-Thomas

Dave Thomas is the author of “Pragmatic Programmer, from journeyman to master”. This video talks about the Dreyfus model, which is 5-stage learning model. The details about it is in the Book “Pragmatic learning and thinking” by Andy Hunt.

3. I Come to Bury Agile, Not to Praise It, by Alistar CockBurn
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/cockburn-bury-not-praise-agile
This video talks about a Shu-Ha-Ri, a 3-stage learning model, I first learned Shu-Ha-Ri from his book “Agile Software Development”

4. Deliberate Practice in Software Development, by Marry Poppendieck,
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/poppendieck-deliberate-practice-in-software-development
Marry Poppendieck is regarded the first person who apply Toyota’s Lean technology into software development, this video she provide the 10-year rule theory, emphasizes the craftsmanship and clean code.

5. Productive Programmer: On the Lam from the Furniture Police, by Neal Ford
http://library.theserverside.com/detail/RES/1242309506_447.html?asrc=vcatssc_sitepost_05_14_09
The author of “Productive programmer”, he talked about the principles in his book, the book of “Peopleware” and “pragmatic learning and thinking”

6. Transcendence and Passing Through the Gate, by Dave West
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/transcendence-gate-dave-west

This video is really interesting, it talks about agile, but he use the concept of Zen. He mentioned the famous 10 Bulls pictures which describe 10 different stages of a human being to describe the agile development.