When I read those words I was struck with by the wonderful juxtaposition. Here we have a truly recognized master of his craft explaining to us that through all his work, effort, passion, and persistence, he has managed to get to the starting line.

I recently conducted a Coding Dojo at the offices of 8th Light. As you know I typically wear a green band on my wrist. But as I moved to the front of the room to lead the Dojo, I removed the green band and replaced it with a black one to take the role of a sen sei. Once the Dojo was over, I quickly removed the black band and put the green one back on.

Recently I’ve been working a lot on FitNesse. I’ve written more code in the last three months than I’d written in the three years before. And let me tell you: I’m loving it! But the effort has also made me realize how much more I have to learn, and just how badly I do what I do.

Just two days ago I found myself in the bowels of a module trying to move some data that had been calculated in one part of that module to where it could be used in another part. I struggled with the problem for hours. I happened to be at the 8th Light office at the time (I often hang out there to be around other programmers. My own company, Object Mentor is distributed, so I don’t get to hang with the mentors nearly often enough.) One of the guys was in an up mood, and was cracking jokes and telling stories. Though his banter was nothing unusual, nor particularly egregious, I found I could not focus on the problem at hand. I had to move to a quieter part of the office.

First, how did I let the code get to the point where the data I needed was calculated so far away from where it was used? Second, why couldn’t I get this problem into my head in a normal social programming context? I shouldn’t have gotten myself into that fix in the first place, and I shouldn’t have had to sequester myself to get myself out of the fix in the second. I am very disappointed in my performance.

I could go on. I could tell you how I still continually fight the demons that encourage me to rush instead of following a disciplined course. I could tell you about all the tests I don’t write. I could tell you about the constant allure of shortcuts and my imperfection at avoiding them. I could tell you how often I look at that green band on my wrist and shudder at how imperfectly I follow it’s urgings.

There is much I have yet to learn about writing software well. So, although after 56 years of life, and 43 years of programming, I have achieved a modicum of success, and even some glory, Chef Baglio is right. It is from that point that you really start to learn.