distracted828

When you start looking for jobs, only join a company that does TDD and pair programming. Ask about this in interviews.

TDD helps you break down tasks and, when you lose focus, you can regain it by re-running your test suite and seeing which test fails.

Pair programming help you because:

- They'll tend to have closer to a 10-6 schedule rather than encouraging you to stay up late.

- When talking through the problem with a colleague, you break the task down more easily and get through whatever mental block you have.

- You can't get distracted when someone else is right there.

It may be harder to find a company that does this because many folks think that they can move faster if they build something the "quick and dirty" way. "Quick and dirty" doesn't exist for you. "Quick and dirty" means that the project either fails outright or is one that you start procrastinating on until you get fired.

Take a look at the book The Clean Coder (http://www.amazon.com/The-Clean-Coder-Professional-Programme...). It talks about procrastination and how to overcome it.

For a practical introduction to TDD, I'm a fan of Test-Driven Web Development with Python. It is Free. http://chimera.labs.oreilly.com/books/1234000000754

Yea, I've only had about 4 years since I got out of school. Trying to be better able to break the task down is part of why I want to do the studying

Well the things I listed in my OP are my concrete ideas for how to approach these working on these things. If you have other concrete suggestions, I would love to hear them.

As an example: The reason why I focus on studying rails is that all of the debugging techniques I know about involve getting a better idea of the system at some layer of abstraction. I suspect that my best shot at getting better at debugging is to know the framework the code is written in very well and thereby be able to understand the codebase more easily.

For a problem like "I can't get clarity around what we are trying to do here.", it seems like there aren't any books on the topic. Thats why I figured that finding a mentor would be good.

What I mean is, how do you keep it from catching up with you a week later?

Sure, but at a certain point, you need to learn a method to writing a maintainable codebase. Otherwise you never become capable of building a successful project.

It is something I've wished I could do. In fact, I am considering only working at a company that does pair programming.

Here is something I don't understand: How does one effectively deliver on a project while writing crappy code? Doesn't trying to do that result in the codebase becoming so confusing that you don't know how to add things to it without breaking other things?

Having been part of a technical organization that was a democracy: no.

I'll take a monarchy over 5-hour meetings where nothing is decided and the room hates each other any day.

> failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time

As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired.

Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.