My First Blog post

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Today I had a very impressive day. Very busy day at work today. I am leaving my current company and obviously they are trying to make best of my remaining days by fully utilizing my capacity. I also kind of had a heavy dinner and I can’t sleep while my GF is snoring away right beside me (don’t tell her). So here I am deciding to write my first blog post.
My Life as a programmer
You see I have many programmer friends around me in fact my housemate is one and 50% of my friends are programmers. However many of them do not think of coding as I do.
How I think of coding
When I code an application I constantly face “forks”. When I say forks I’m not talking about cutlery. I’m talking about times you have to make decisions and choose one method, technique, or approach over another. To make myself more clear here is a real life scenario:
Today I was coding in VBA on an Excel sheet. I have created a hidden sheet as my work space. Here I store few processed data so I don’t have to process them again since VBA acts weird on variable management and I am not sure how long my variables life time is. There were many cases I happily decide to use the variable but turned out the variable is empty.
Anyway, let’s get back to the scenario. The “fork” I faced today is whether access the value stored on a cell in excel sheet every time it is needed or load that data into a local variable and refer to it as many times as I want without thinking about performance issues that might exist when accessing the cell on sheet. Here are my concerns when making the decision:

  1. It is good to refer to the value on the sheet because you know the value will be always there and has no life time.
  2. VBA has very limited memory management I believe and my code on the app is kind of heavy for its kind. So creating small local variables like this might increase chance of failure due to memory management issue.
  3. Accessing a cell in the sheet might be a call to Hard Disk which brings down my application through put.

I know my lack of knowledge over VBA is obvious all over my thinking but hey, this kind of information cannot be easily found on the internet. I even tried asking on online communities and I have got a few swear words back (figuratively, dahhh… We are polite people). My best chance might be finding couple of books in this regard in the library and going through the index hoping to find a chapter that might have an answer for me.
You know not that I am lazy person but I have same set of questions when I program in any other programming language and I feel if I want to find an answer for these sort of questions I gonna have to spend my entire time in library which certainly not gonna make any money for me nor for my angry employee that I only can image him in my head at the moment.
Here are my friends and colleagues reaction when they hear this:

  • Wtf?!
  • Dude, you thinking too much, just choose one and you are set unless a bug report came in
  • huh? If you wanna think about all these little things, you are wasting time and your processor power on infinite loop that is printing “Hello World”
  • you are good unless you are proven otherwise.
  • hey… I don’t wanna friend you no more (what my ex told me)

So I am lost in a controversy. Am I wrong of thinking about this? Should I be more active in discovering the information I need? Is there a domain knowledge that I have no clue about? Maybe I should understand compilers or read more about how memory management is done? If you have a suggestion to put me out of this misery do share it with me in the comment section below or just share swear words if u may.
Cheers

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