I can't believe I missed it but the 22nd of June marked 10 years since I started this blog. I'm currently reading "How to Learn Anything in 20 Hours" and it talks about the oft misquoted fact that "it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill". Reflecting back over the past 10 years and the hours spent on C++, I don't consider myself a master programmer but I do consider myself to be 'pretty good'.
I occasionally go back right to beginning and laugh at my old green text where I talk about being confused by bools and I still remember the anguish of the night I spent 6 hours solving how to print a number if a user inputted number was bigger or smaller than the last one. But I also remember the feeling of elation when it worked.
I don't post that much on here anymore, mainly because I'm now ten years older than when I started and my life is drastically different with a lot more responsibilities. But still, I tinker away, creating drafts that maybe will see the light of day years down the line. One such draft was my thoughts on LLMs and where the industry is going. Due to my job (and the fact that I very much need my job to pay my mortgage) and my crippling addiction to food and water, that will remain in the drafts section but I will say that it has given me a lot of opportunities to reflect on what exactly I want from my career and my programming journey.
I love learning. I love picking up new hobbies and I've learnt how to weaponise and hone my ADHD into something useful. My ability to hyperfocus on things until I feel I've "learnt enough" makes me feel kind of bad for people who can't do that.
In the age of 'VibeCoding', I now consider myself a 'TradCoder' (I write this with utmost irony). I look forward to finishing work and being able to write horrific code, and make terrible projects and games but it's the learning (and the knowledge/satisfaction that I did it myself). I've realised I want to wear 'all the hats'. I don't need to be a master on one specific thing, I just need to be good enough at everything.
I'm going to pick up Bjarne's latest version of Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ and do it all over again. Then maybe I'll get round to doing The C++ Programming Language. I've learnt that I'm a bit of a C++ purist (count me on the side of Bjarne during the current 'Civil War') and I'm not a fan of a lot of the new stuff they keep introducing in new standards. I mainly use PowerShell and Terraform at work these days as I venture in the Platform Engineering side of things so it's nice to be able to write C++ exactly the way I want to 'at home' and not hate writing it at work.
I think about making more videos as well but that's a time commitment I don't know I'm ready for. 10 years on though I know that I love writing C++ and I love making games. They don't have great, they don't even have to be good but I will never regret picking up that book all those years ago and forcing myself to learn programming at 25 and changing my career. I never thought I'd be able to buy a house but Bjarne's book, the degree and my internship helped me turn my life around. I don't have a solid plan on where I'm going but I know it will have something to do with C++ and video games.
Here's to the next 10 years and thank you to everyone who stops by (even the bots who trawl my site to teach LLM models on the contents).
