Everyone wants to be good in what he’s doing – that’s human nature, that’s how we’re raised. The key is constant improvement without being disappointed by small failures and bumps on the way. In the last 10 years I’ve been working as a developer and I feel I’ve learnt a lot of valuable lessons – many of which can be applied to other areas of life and work. Let me share my lessons with you, dear reader.

 

 

In this ever-changing world of software development it’s extremely important to keep up with current technologies, methodologies and trends. It can easily get out of hand though – simply there’s not enough time for anyone to learn all new stuff, work and live a normal life simultaneously. Selection is thus the key, being smartly selective about new things to learn so we won’t miss important stuff but also keep ‘junk’ or unimportant trends out.

I created this small and ever-incomplete list of things I feel we all should pay attention to and practice. Some items could be considered ‘old’ (read: more than a few months old) but still not grasped enough yet.

 

Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine: Hpricot

Hpricot has saved my life many times when I had to parse (x)html documents and extract information programatically. It features a very nice ruby-ish syntax and a blazingly fast xpath-based parser. Combine it with open-uri, and you’re in for a fun ride creating a data-extracting web spider.