The model town board is the ultimate symbol of the first step towards earning the driving license, atleast here in Kenya. The first steps the instructor takes you throught is memorizing and maybe understanding the the 3 rules of the model town. After that then comes the driving around the toy cars and having to crum through what options each of the lanes have.
Driving through the lanes involves tackling various challenges like making sure one parks behind a given vehicle.Back at the time when I was taking my driving classes the introductory insisted on a fourth rule; talk through your decisions. Driving school is now done and I have my driving license already, however those lessons still echo in my mind. By having to speak through the decision on the model town board, it helped actually think through those decisions and correct it became easy to correct with minimal energy even from a discussion point of view.
In the software development world it makes alot of sense to think slightly abit more about what a given statement means. In the world of internet and all time connectivity then it is quite easy for developer to find thousands of snippets online to solve their problems. Consider the sql script below.
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[sometable](
[Id] [int] IDENTITY(1,1) NOT NULL,
[Url] [nvarchar](2000) NULL,
[ResponseCode] [int] NOT NULL,
[ResponseMessage] [nvarchar](255) NULL,
[RequestDate] [datetime] NOT NULL,
[DoneBy] [nvarchar](200) NULL,
CONSTRAINT [PK_dbo.sometable] PRIMARY KEY CLUSTERED
(
[Id] ASC
)) ON [PRIMARY]
GO
What exactly happens here. A superficial look of things could simply be
Its a table creation script.
However with more attention to detail it includes any of all these:-
- Create a table with the schema dbo.
- Some columns allow null values while others dont.
- We have a clustered index on the column Id which is the primary key.
- This table is created on the primary file group.
Thinking through some of these things just like in driving school is good from a technical perspective as it helps start asking questions which definitely work in the favour of growth. For instance once might easily explore what exactly are clustered indexes or even file groups.
Even though I had to give a kick back during my days at the non-disclosed driving, in turn I got this valuable lesson.