Many developers and programmers may describe their experience with a language or technology as them having “mastered” it. But is this really the case?

Take me as an example- I cannot think of a single technology that I feel comfortable saying I “mastered”; even those that I’ve worked with extensively, such as the C# language itself, or the .NET Framework, or the Java Base Class Library, I don’t feel safe saying I’ve “mastered”. The way I see it, “mastered” implies that for any question about that technology, you will have an answer for. I cannot, personally, say that I’ve reached that stage. In fact, it’s debatable whether any person reaches that stage about anything. C#-wise I’ve worked extensively with the framework, serialization, dynamic dispatch (via C# 4.0/5.0’s “dynamic” keyword).

“Mastered” for me implies that there is nothing left to learn for that person in that field; but when you think about it, that’s sort of impossible, particularly in regards to software development, programming, and even just computers in general. There is always more to learn, there is always ground left uncovered, and as you uncover that ground you reveal just how much you don’t know. One of my favourite quotes, attributable to Dave Ward, is:

“the more you know, the more you realize just how much you don’t know. So paradoxically, the deeper down the rabbit hole you go, the more you might tend to fixate on the growing collection of unlearned peripheral concepts that you become conscious of along the way.”

This is from Scott Hanselmans blog post on a similar subject- titled “I’m a phony. Are you?”  In many ways, I find myself identifying with this- For example, I still often try to rationalize my reception of an MVP Award as “oh, it’s nothing” or “must have been a mistake”; that is, like the post describes and quotes, people that feel like an imposter. The MVP Award is not just given away to anybody, though. Best I can think of would be that my Blog posts with regard to C# Programming (and programming topics in general) were that good. Personally I have a hard time really believing that.

Much like Scott Hanselman describes in the post, I try to learn a new programming language- even if I don’t use it for a large project, the exposure to new concepts and problem domains can really improve my work in those languages that I’ve used for a longer period, and hold off stagnation. But even so, very seldom do I ever get deep enough into those languages to truly grasp their idioms.

And yet, at the same time, When I push myself into a language- I  eventually catch on. For example- and I’ve written about this before- I languished with Visual Basic 6 for a very long time. I thought it was good enough- there is nothing better. This is what I told others, but who was I trying to convince, them, or me? I aim for the latter. I don’t know what prompted me to do so but I moved on to C#. Now in fairness even then I did at least give other languages a shot, but VB6 was the only one that felt “familiar”; that is, that I could easily type code in without looking up documentation. At some point I’d had enough. Visual Basic 6 was an old, dead, language, and so too would my experience if I didn’t do something. I moved to C# instead of VB.NET mostly out of my own self-interest; I still had many projects in VB6 and I (possibly erroneously) thought that learning VB.NET might cloud my ability to work on those projects. That, and C# seemed to be the de riguer standard.

My first applications were rather simple. I made an attempt to duplicate the functionality of HijackThis first- this was a learning experience, particularly since I was now able to use those OO concepts I knew about but was never able to leverage properly in VB6, which only had interface inheritance. I moved forward with a simple game. This was to become the first version of BCDodger, which is a relatively simple game. The major stumbling block here was with regard to the use of multiple threads and handling concurrency and handling repainting. I eventually looked at my ancient ‘Poing’ game, which was an arkanoid/breakout clone I had written in Visual Basic 6. It was terrible- the drawing code was limited, everything was ugly and there was very little “whizbang” to the presentation. I decided to make a variant of the game in C#, using a better design and a class heirarchy. This snowballed pretty quickly, and I now have a game that is able to dynamically load new components from scripts (which it compiles at startup), has a fully-featured editor that is able to find and show any class that implements a specific interface or derives from a given class in portions of the interface; for example the “add block” toolbar dropdown get’s populated with every single block in the game, categorized based on attributes on the appropriate classes.

With Freelancing, my results have been met with an overwhelmingly positive response, in one case, where I was tasked with using Semantic cleanup of a longest common subsequence algorithm, there was some back-and forth over what might be the best output given what we were working with; the client eventually responded that they did some research and are pretty sure it’s impossible. By which time, I had actually finished implementing it. Needless to say, the results were very positive. The same applies for a similar project where I created the Product Key registration and generation logic in a self-contained class.

The nice thing is that these projects exposed me to things I might not have dealt with before. WPF was a technology I didn’t use until it’s appeal in a given situation made it very much preferable. Full screen, resolution independence was a lot easier with WPF than it would be with Windows Forms- so now I have experience with WPF as well. Naturally the overwhelmingly boring nature of Semantic cleanup of the output of a longest common subsequence algorithm (I nearly fell asleep writing that…) meant I wouldn’t otherwise explore it; however it turned out to be very interesting as well as mentally taxing. There was, of course, some confusion. But each time I was able to look at it with freshly rested eyes (apparently staying up for 48 hours working on the same problem clouds your judgement), I was able to find some very obvious fix or addition to resolve that which I was working on. I guess it boils down to- if you just write what you <want> you will always try to work on something interesting, but not always useful. When working on an actual project- for somebody else, or as an otherwise professional undertaking, what you work on might not always be fun, but it will always be useful to somebody. So in some respects this rubs off; with my own projects, I try to make them fun to work on, but might not always pay the closest attention to how useful they are; in retrospect when working in a professional capacity, whether they are useful is the most important goal. A program that isn’t useful is useless by definition.

This isn’t to say the experience isn’t occasionally frustrating; when you provide a product or service to somebody or something, I like to think there is some sort of a promise of the workmanship of that product; for example on more than one occasion, a product has stopped suiting the original purpose; for example, this could be because it was not as scalable as it needed to be, or perhaps a database corruption has caused some other problems. Whatever the case, since the product no longer works for the original intent, I could never charge for the service of getting the product working again- because that almost seems like holding them hostage.

At the same time, however, part of me doesn’t like releasing new products, simply because it feels like a lifetime contract to keep working on and improving them. This is part of why the vast majority of projects I’ve worked on I’ve not released. and by “vast  majority” we’re talking about nearly a hundred projects. Some big, some small; most of them unfinished in some fashion but most quite usable.

But I’m getting off the topic of this post. My point is, that I like to think I’m fairly awesome, but at the same time, not too awesome. There is plenty out there to learn, and the pursuit of awesomeness demands that I seek them out, absorb them, and then continue. Like a sponge that comes alive and wants to suction up all the water in the world, my task will never be completed. But that doesn’t stop me from trying anyway.

This applies in a general sense, as well; It’s not just programming that I’m very interested in, but rather tangential topics such as gaming and whatnot. I do also enjoy science-fiction- statistically, as a person who works in Software Development, this is more likely than not- as well as simply general knowledge. A good example being a tab I have open in my browser, where I was researching Eggplant. Why? I haven’t a clue. Just something I wanted to absorb and learn about, I suppose.

Conclusion: learning about Eggplants is unlikely to make you a better programmer. But it never hurts to stay versed on vegetables.