Staying Fresh

Complacency is a terrible temptation and one we deal with every day. You get accustomed to doing things a certain way and then wham, you interview and people are doing things a totally different way and you are caught flat footed. I remember when I knew that I wasn't a great developer -- we were working on an application, spending 12 hours a day coding Java code, trying to optimize our code so that we could get decent response on 56k connection. While we're all trying to cut down the data (to reduce packets), one of the guys on the team said, hey, why don't we do everything with XML/XSL. We were confused, what was that (this is 1999). He'd been reading up on it after hours. Basically, the XSL would be downloaded once and then every subsequent time it would reside on the users cache. Problem solved. That's the mark of a great programmer.