martinrue

I trade Forex as a hobby. I find it fascinating to learn about an entirely different industry, yet in many ways see similarities with software development.

I've started a blog where I'm going to detail more of my trades and thoughts. To start with, I'm doing a short interview series with established financial traders about their day-to-day work, if anyone is interested: http://trading.martinrue.com

The partner note at the bottom is spot on. I have reflectively seen myself doing it. I used to get so focused on the particular idea I had that I lost sight of the fact I was solving a problem, for which there were likely many solutions – blinded by wanting to simply do it the way I had in my head. Conversations would just be a way for me to validate my concrete idea, not to search for additional ideas or entirely new approaches to the problem.

I like this essay because it serves as a personal reminder to always avoid that. As soon as you close your mind off from the ideas others may give you (directly or indirectly), you've lost.

Just to add some context: the fascination I describe with C is from the perspective of a 15 year old learning to write his first real tool.

And, in fact, I knew nothing else at the time. What I essentially describe in the post is a learning process – not the events of a professional developer making a reasond choice of the best language to use for a particular problem.

Simplicity is something I've come to appreciate exactly because of such experiences early in my career.

I'm trying to emphasise the focus on quality in the article. If you're fearful of breaking it this is not good. We need to be confident that we can make changes without screwing it up.

Too many people create poor first attempts and leave it at that (the example I used was a process which breaks once per month, indicating there is room for improvement that would save Fred time), claiming later "if it ain't broke". I think this is a recipe for disaster because it reflects an attitude that lacks a desire to improve.

However, there are times when it "ain't broken" and it is good enough, and in those situations I agree with other comments that you wouldn't want people wasting time looking to make micro-optimisations. Ultimately I am making the point that people need to have the right attitude toward improvement and quality overall.

Whether you are curious or not, if you click the button you cannot be trusted to follow the instructions that tell you not to click it.

I wanted to know how many people hit the page and are able to resist their curiosity in favour of following the instructions.

36 sets of visitors ended up viewing the page. The largest set that followed the instructions was 7 before someone clicked it.