Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Egoless Boots

How did I name this thing? Well, never fault a dot-com name that is simply available, but beyond that, I want this to be about bootstrapping on an egloless path.

Bootstrapping is an old word. It refers to pulling oneself up by one's own boot-straps. The phrase made the jump to computing sometime in the 1950s and has stuck. It generally means starting small and working your way up. I hope to provide one path for "pulling oneself up" into computer programming, using the resources of the web.

"Egoless" might seem a strange word to add, but I think it's important. It refers to Egoless Programming. The idea is that, as much as possible, we should keep our egos out of it and just pursue the best answer. When two programmers trade ideas, it should be about what's best for the user at the end of the day, and not just "mine's better." Having that attitude makes us better students, and teachers as the years go by.

If that sounds good, continue on to my sidebar

2 comments:

  1. Just stumbled across your blog, and am extremely excited...as a 40-something passionately curious woman looking to build a solid foundation in programming out of whatever neuorons I have still humming, and without the resources to go back to school, I was looking for a bootstrap method to get me started.

    While I greatly appreciate your sharing of 30+ years of knowledge, I most appreciate your approach - so many of the resources I have looked at presume a foundation of knowledge that I simply don't have - and then the argot overwhelms me and ARGH! Too often I ended up feeling like Charlie Brown after Lucy takes the football away...AGAIN!

    So, thank you. Cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to learning...Thank you!

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  2. Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you find these pages useful. Don't hesitate to add a comment or ask a question wherever anything is unclear. Good luck!

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