Pondering about programming

Sometimes it is good to take some distance from what you're doing, so you can set your priorities for the near future.

Wat is programming, actually?

Seems to be a silly question, because you'd think that programming is about producing code, but it's not.

I suggest you read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years, by Peter Norvig. Most noteworthy programs are written as team efforts, and if you want to become a good programmer, you need to be able to work in a team, sometimes as an experienced leader and sometimes as a novice to the software project (in order to give orders, you have to be able to follow orders as well).

A good programmer has good interpersonal skills and can work in teams. Interactions between programmers are perhaps more important than the code they write.

Writing good code should be the goal

Unfortunately, the coding community has the reputation of writing bad, bug-ridden code, that needs constant updating and lots of support to and feedback from the end-users (which explains why good customer support is such a large chuck in the total costs of software development). Also, people tend to own a part of a project, do poor documentation, then run away from projects and leave the team with undocumented, buggy code, which has to be fixed by other people. There are a lot of bad coding teams out there. Not necessarily because the team members are bad coders, but because the team's organization, well um, sucks.

So how to spot good coding practices? Read The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code and learn.