To Become More Productive, To Become a Professional

Programmers

Being professional most of the time requires to fully understand what they are doing with their tools, and be productive in order to get the desired result with the shortest amount of time. This can be especially applied for those 'technical professionals' such as programmers.

Why programmers? Because programmers as a job usually have something that they are asked to create within the specified time, and of course, expected to accomplish it and satisfy their customers or products' users. In that sense, it is reasonable to say that there is no doubt people seek a way to become productive, efficient, and therefore, successful as a professional.

The book called "The Pragmatic Programmer" suggests programmers or students willing to become programmers in their future that one of the shortcuts for becoming more productive and efficient is to choose right, appropriate tools.

As an example of choosing tools for becoming more productive, the book suggests that people try to avoid using GUI applications if possible and rather use Command Prompt(or Terminal for Mac users).

A benefit of GUIs is WYSIWYG-what you see is what you get. The disadvantage is WYSIAYG-what you see is all you get.

As the sentences above explain everything, the advantage of GUI application, such as the simple usage of it, full visualization of its functionality, etc proves that it cannot function beyond what it displays to its users. Moreover, most of the times using GUI applications requires more steps to be done to do an certain action, while command prompt or terminal only requires a few steps for that action. (It is very clear by comparing lists of steps required for each application, GUIs and Command Prompt(Terminal).

I, Mac user, personally rarely use Terminal for any programming process.. (Except for downloading Ruby and so on that is required to use Terminal). The reason why I have rarely used Terminal is because it just seems difficult for me, and as the book points out, I was thinking that using GUI application is easy for me rather than typing texts for doing something on the computer.

Personal Review

After I read the book, however, I began to think that I should be using Terminal by now since I am one of the people who are strongly willing to become a professional in Tech field, and I can at least say that I may have to be a friend of Terminal for work in the future. The book is very persuasive in a way that using Terminal makes you very efficient and productive since it requires fewer steps to do a certain action than GUI applications require. I guess it is time for me to jump in and play with Terminal to discover something new for me. :)

To become more productive, to become a professional . . .