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A Small Pragmatic Advise to Programmer

At Digicorp, we try to push programmers in taking the pragmatic approach to software engineering. The approach was conceptualized by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas in their book Pragmatic Programmer.

Today I came across a small problem where we could apply pragmatic approach. There was a case where the programmer had to do data entry in almost 20 tables. Doing this manually is obviously a tedious task. So we jointly discussed how we can do it using a simple formula of concatenation in excel.

Based on our discussion, the programmer came up with a small tool which generates SQL queries automatically base on excel data. She would do data entry in excel and use generated queries to populate the database instead of manually making entries in SQL server or writing scripts. This tool will help bring automation to various places in our organization. e.g. Generating test data scripts, Importing data from any excel sheet etc.

We changed our perception of the problem and found the optimal solution which not only solved this one problem but will help us solve many similar problems. This kind of small change in the perception of your work can help you become a pragmatic programmer instead of being just-another-programmer.

If you want to become a great programmer, do read the Pragmatic Programmer. We have given this book as a gift to many of our programmers on their anniversary with us.

Do share any of the pragmatic learning you had during your journey as a programmer in comments