Complete Developer Podcast

Arrays are a basic data structure that are used to store values and associated keys. You'll see them across most languages though the names of operations might change or how you implement the arrays. They are related to other data structures such as linked lists.

It's not likely you'll see all of these on one team but knowing them can help you guide your team or workplace away from them. If you see one of these patterns start to develop act quickly to quell the anti-pattern before it takes hold.

Zack Burt has been programming for 20 years and consulting for 10 years and he truly loves programming. Over the years, he has worked for large companies and startups in both individual contributor and leadership roles. He is passionate about open source, both in submitting pull requests and launching open source projects. His first book is called Code For Cash and teaches developers about breaking into the world of freelance consulting.

Functional programming is based on lambda calculus. Functions must return the same output given the same inputs no matter the state and cannot affect anything outside of the function. Functions can be set to variables and can return functions or be given functions as arguments. Objects and variables cannot be changed once initialized.

Motivation is defined as "the reason or reasons one has for acting or behaving in a particular way" or "the general desire or willingness of someone to do something". It's easy to come up with a lot of lofty goals at the beginning of the year but difficult to keep them going.

Logging provides routine diagnostic information when a debugger is not running such as in production. It is used to provide runtime proof that the app is still running (not in a zombie state), an audit trail or other forensic data, and troubleshoot rare bugs that can't be reproduced in development.

Continuing the New Year theme the guys review their resolutions from last year and discuss how they accomplished or missed them. Then they each give six resolutions for this year.

This week Will and BJ review their predictions for 2016 and making new ones for 2017. First they breifly look at the predictions each made last year and see which came to be and which were way off. Then they each make predictions for the this year.

Most of the literature about habit formation state it takes 3-4 weeks to form a new habit. A lot of times you have habits that don't serve you or you need to form new habits to reach a goal. Rather than just letting things happen consciously evaluate your life and make the changes to help reach your goals. You should revisit your habits at least annually to see the ones that stuck and why they did and why the other ones didn't.

Cody joins the discussion to talk about breaking into the development world without a degree or any formal training. He started college and for a time was a computer science major but left to persue a career as a developer.

There are many reasons that you might not know you are a bad developer. If you are just going through the motions because of a bad work environment or family life you can become a bad developer even when you aren't most of the time. Many of these are less about the quality of the code doing most of the work and more about your own impact on the development ecosystem around you.

Before starting to learn a new programming language you should take a few considerations. How different is the new language from your current one? Compare the environment, paradigm, syntax, and level of automatic operations between the languages.

Frustration occurs when results or goals do not fit the effort you apply toward them. This can come as internal or external goal blockages. Internal blockages come from personal deficiencies or competing goals. External blockages are conditions outside of oneself.

Premature optimization will really harm your efficiency as a developer, without providing any real benefit to the execution of your application. That doesn't mean you never do, but you have to choose the places where your effort will not negatively impact your own efficiency.

This week the guys invited their friend Erin Orstrom to join them in a round table discussion on their different experiences in learning to code and the concepts of computer science. Will has a degree in Computer Information Systems whereas Erin and BJ have degrees in other fields but ultimately came to programming as a career.