Breaking news, software development is problem solving.
Yes, hardly news. The truth is everything is problem solving. Life is problem solving.
But applying yourself to finding a solution – that’s where success lies.
Cranmore developer Ryan Morrison seems to have this figured out early on.
Speaking to us for Source Code he explains he was inspired, like many developers, by the book Clean Code. He paraphrases a section were author ‘Uncle Bob’ (Robert C. Martin) talks about writing a new function.
“Just because you’ve done something, that doesn’t mean it’s finished,” Ryan says. “It’s when you come back and look at it again, that’s when you find a better perspective.”
The idea has more than just stuck with him. It has permeated his entire outlook.
Ryan joined Cranmore as a placement student after a recommendation from his friend Stuart Collinson.
“I liked what he said about the tech being used and how friendly and social it was,” he says.
“I was excited to get the offer to come back fulltime and I was very eager to do it.”
But Ryan wasn’t a born programmer. He didn’t spend his youth building PCs or playing video games. Computer classes were “boring”, he says, all Excel and point and click.
Some use very clean code, and you’ll see it and think, ‘oh, that’s nice. I’ll use that’,
Ryan Morrison
He was swayed instead by a careers talk. A school alumnus, now developer, rocks up and tells Ryan’s GCSE classmates that just a few years after uni she is about to buy a house.
“That was enough for me,” Ryan laughs.
And while an accomplished full stack developer, Ryan says he’s still learning new perspectives from his colleagues.
“People have different styles,” he says. “Some use very clean code, and you’ll see it and think, ‘oh, that’s nice. I’ll use that’,” and picks out the approaches of Cameron Stevenson and Pedro Figueiredo as two examples.
And this is Ryan; never done even when he’s finished. Always looking for another perspective.
Instead of computer games, he plays Sudoku. He loves crosswords and jigsaws.
“I play a lot of solitaire,” he says, explaining his downtime is ‘brain-training’ games.
He hikes, he swims, he goes to the gym. “Anything that gets me outside,” he says, and tells us about plans to climb Kilimanjaro.
He only started running a few years ago and now runs half marathons for fun.
All great, but there’s a problem.
“I’m really injury prone,” he says. “I’ve had to reimagine how I’m training. I don’t pick a few exercises and think ‘right, that’s how you do it’. Instead, I think about how I’m feeling and change the programme to suit me so I don’t get injured.”
And like a problem to be solved, he’s applying himself to it, looking for that new perspective. And he’ll succeed.
Because that’s what happens when Bob’s your uncle.
