While writing The Programmer’s Black Book, and after it was published (already half a year ago), I received a multitude of messages, suggestions, and comments. They all helped—and continue to help—me improve my work, but some of them gave me a lot to think about.
In particular, people told me that at long last someone had finally written a book in Spanish covering the kinds of experiences I discuss and explicitly talking about clean code, refactorings, and so on. That surprised me quite a bit, given the assumption that software developers, programmers, analysts, and IT professionals in general have a sufficient command of English—the language of much of the technical literature filling our shelves.
Well, that assumption isn’t entirely true, and often people only put on their résumé what they think they’re expected to put there. Have you ever seen a résumé where someone didn’t claim to have an “intermediate level of spoken / written English”?
A few months ago, two interns spent some time doing their placements at the office where I work. They admitted that reading in English was difficult for them and that they much preferred reading posts or books in Spanish.
I’m not saying we should ignore the fact that English dominates our profession, and that if we want to offer our services in a global market, we absolutely have to do so in that language. The point is to recognize that there’s an enormous shortage of sufficiently high-quality, reputable technical software development content in our native language—and that creates a great opportunity to fill the gap.
In my opinion, the reason there isn’t a truly developed market for technical literature in Spanish, written by and for Spanish speakers (rather than just translations, which can sometimes be very poor and expensive), is that we don’t recognize the close relationship between being good—or very good—at your profession and spending some of your time teaching others what you know best.
We need to spend more time teaching, and treat it as a natural part of our profession.
As the saying goes, you don’t know something until you can explain it to your grandmother. Just this week, I was showing my eldest daughter how to write a simple little program in JavaScript (using NodeJS) to add and subtract. I admit I found it difficult to explain things that are so fundamental to programming that we hardly stop to think about them. Among other things, she asked me: if you need another program to make this adding program (the text editor plus the program that runs it, and those in turn are made with other programs), then who made the first program?…
Unfortunately, I find that many people who do write posts don’t keep them up consistently, and a few months later their blogs are completely abandoned. They write because they feel somewhat obligated to, or to gain a certain kind of prestige… but not out of a genuine desire to teach or share.
We need a genuine culture of sharing what we know how to do best, whatever that may be for each of us. Knowledge kept behind a shield eventually loses its value, when in reality it grows as we share it with others. I’m convinced there’s a connection between your technical competence and your ability to demonstrate and teach what you do well.
I already wrote a related chapter in The Programmer’s Black Book, titled “Slave to Your Own Solution, or How to Make Yourself Indispensable”. It discusses how, in workplaces where competition among colleagues is palpable, people mistakenly try to carve out their own areas of control—which eventually become real cages that cost them opportunities.
Personally, I’ve learned much more by writing and sharing the book’s chapters than I would have if I’d simply never stopped to write about those subjects.
Of course, we learn by reading books, watching videos, and talking about topics that interest us. But we also learn by writing, which is a different way of approaching knowledge that lets us explore it more deeply.
My impression is that this is a good time to lead projects and write high-quality Spanish-language material about software technologies. Fortunately, you no longer need a publishing house’s permission for a good work to spread quickly and virally across the Internet and help you succeed.
Likewise, I believe a great many software developers don’t know English well enough, and that better Spanish-language content could give them better training and motivation to become even better at their profession. What I’m saying is that if the English-speaking world has many more successful (and better-known) projects than the Spanish-speaking world, it may be related to the lack of high-quality educational content in our language.
An opportunity? A potential source of new projects? Who knows. But one thing is certain: if there were an excellent portal in our language like sitepoint.com, with good content, many of its Spanish-speaking users would have no hesitation in using it.