Ever since I found out that console programming was a job, I’ve been fascinated by how to make someone a good programmer.  Obviously, at first it was how to make ME good at it.  Then this fascination turned to obsession once I became a trainer.  What makes a good programmer?  How can it be taught effectively?  How do you start the journey from programming to Programmer? Though I have many stories and several key moments in my career that put me on the right track, if I had to pick one thing, it would be when I decided to make a template file for my Eos work.

At that point in my career, I was a long time Hog 3/4 programmer, an MA2 programmer and an Eos programmer.  I would do MA2 most often, but I still got hired to go into a theater and program in one of the several Eos halls in my community.  I had already developed a template file for my MA2 programming, but I kind of feel like MA forces you to make a template in order to get anything done at all.  Plus, it’s debatably optimized to support template files.  With Eos, I actually find the platform difficult to make a template in.  How you are supposed to set things up so your data (palettes, effects, etc) travels well isn’t intuitive to me and I couldn’t find resources that could or would explain it to me.  (If you’re at the same place, I wrote an article that walks you through how to take a show file and turn it into a template file. ETC appears to have some blog posts as well, but I’ve not read them.)  Regardless- I did it and it became a turning point for me as a programmer.  Why?  I think it’s because I took possession of my data. 

People invest years of sweat and strategy into their templates.  It becomes both a toolbox and a repository of answers when you forget how you solved something in the past.  Since I didn’t find it easy to set up in Eos, it took much more time and attention from me to design what I wanted and then figure out how to seamlessly import and export my data.  This investment forced me to learn some things I had been avoiding.  Once I had the template and was using it, it saved me a ton of time that I used to learn more functions and tricks of Eos.

I want to emphasize that I’m not saying this is the only way to become a good programmer.  I don’t think there is a single way to do so.  In fact, when I did a fast text poll of my programmer friends, it was evenly divided in their responses between a template and other things.  But I think the universal concept among all the responses was taking possession of your data.  I just happened to do that by making a template file.

What turning point happened for you?  What set you on the path to becoming a better programmer?  Would love to hear everyone’s story in the comments!