If you want to be great, you’re responsible for making yourself great

If you want to be great, you’re responsible for making yourself great.

This is one of many interesting statements in the book called Code Complete. In reality, this is true for the personal development, not just for the software people. This book gave me the detailed instructions and practices to be great in the software industry.

I am not going to write a book review here. If you expect something like that, Goodreads is always a friend. Instead, I will note down something for myself.

I read this book for years, exactly three years and a half, which spanned the working time of my current and previous companies. In short, it’s worth every minute to read and enjoy this book.

The following thoughts have popped up into my mind:

• The book is suitable for everyone in creating software, from beginners to junior developers to senior developers to CTO. You can have a quick look at the table of content and find a specific chapter in the case you have a real issue.
• After reading the first chapters of books, I started explaining the software development to people outside of software industry with a less intangible imagination — building a house.
• In the past, I read code from someone else, and I did not understand anything. Then I assumed that the author would be so amazing when being able to write a complicated code like that. However, now it turns out the author may be a terrible developer. At the end of writing code, we need to achieve two purposes: machine-readable and human-readable. Following the correct syntax is good to go for the first purpose, which is so easy. For the second one, it is like explaining complicated things in simple words for novices.
• During over three years of reading the book, I have looked at the good and bad code, the previous and current company development process. It’s so amazing that I can notice the differences and find out that my companies following almost good practices.

 P/s: Random thoughts from a close-to-intermediate-developer-level person. Haha, I am ready to read next books.