Helping Out a Fellow Programmer or How I Learned to Love the Code Again

This week I found out that a guy I work with is a brand new programmer. He has some experience working with ASP.NET in the VB language. I have had a couple of conversations with the guy to evaluate his technical skills. It is confirmed, he is a new programmer. He is also eager to learn and seems to be fairly bright.

I have started him off with a programming challenge and a reading assignment. For the programming challenge, I went over to the Sphere Online Judge website to grab the problem 'Life, the Universe, and Everything' the classical problems page. The reading assignment is from the MSDN website: System Namespace, Object class, Console class and Introduction to the IDE webpages.

My personal opinion is I should also do the programming and reading assignments I am giving out. I am doing this for two main reasons. The first being, I don't want to over whelm the guy with information. The other reason is to make sure I also understand the material. I have discovered an interesting benefit of working with this new programmer. I am being forced to think about code in different ways. I need to be able to explain the code to someone else and I am also thinking multiple ways that the code could be written.

This is going to be an adventure.