One of the things that has astounded me throughout my career is how many accolades you can get for doing simple things to fix pain points at your company… even when the things you do weren’t even remotely clever, or even when it wasn’t your idea, and even when your “big idea” may have been thought of by virtually every other person that has ever held your position or a similar position in your company (or any company). The difference between you and all those other people that had the same idea is that you decided to actually do something to improve your company, even if it may not have been in your job description and even if it wasn’t really your place to do anything about it.

Most relatively experienced programmers have come across the idea that typically ++i, using the prefix ++ operator, is more efficient than i++, the postfix operator, and this is usually the case. Particularly for user-defined types, you should always use the prefix operator unless you know you need the postfix, because it avoids the unnecessary and potentially costly copying of the object into a temporary variable before increment takes place.

One of my co-workers told me today about the new Rider IDE from JetBrains, and I was intrigued. He’s been a big fan of ReSharper (productivity tools for Visual Studio, mostly for the .NET world, but I also noticed that they have a C++ version), and so he was excited at the prospect of a full IDE with the ReSharper tools included natively. I was excited about the prospect of a relatively lightweight IDE (Visual Studio always feels kind of sluggish, even on fast hardware) and native cross-platform development with full profiling tools at an attractive price-point.

In the last week, I’ve replaced much of the time that I normally waste spend on games and put it in to answering questions on Stack Overflow. To my surprise, this has been a much more fulfilling activity than I expected. I would even describe it as helping me rekindle my passion for software development and helping others. One of my favorite jobs ever was tutoring students in math, Computer Science, language arts, etc., at the university where I was attending. It paid almost nothing, of course, and sometimes it was not the easiest, but it was fun for me. I had to be ready for almost any question, had to learn how to explain things as simply as possible and using multiple techniques, and got a very real sense of satisfaction out of helping people figure things out that would hopefully improve their grades, but more importantly, increase their knowledge and improve their lives.