Keep up with evolving art of programming

Today, one of my team mate came up to me and asked - How to write a bug free code?  Asking how to write a bug free code is asking - how to create a beautiful painting? A piece of program is equivalent to a painting. Isn't it?

Programming is a skill, because it can be taught and specialized through experience.

Programming is also an art, it relies on instincts and intuitiveness, it is a "creative" process.

Imagine a painter (programmer), more than the subject that is getting painted, the painter is passionate about the process of creating the painting itself. There are certain guidelines that are to be followed while painting ( like the good coding standards), but beyond that it is about perfecting the art in finer details, like the shade of the blade of grass in a landscape that makes the painting what it is (paying attention to the solving the problem, performance and also to the corner cases).

Well, we are at a time, when sitting on the rock for hours together to paint a landscape is considered a futile enterprise or a luxurious one, when you can just "click it". 

Just as photographs have replaced paintings to a large extent, the newer languages/tools have made it easy to write programs. Like a good picture depends on the camera, a good program depends on the languages/tools used to develop the program. These days, you don't even have to know you wrote bad code. They (Tools) can tell you that!

If you have not used/heard of tools like Sonar/Ansible, may be you still don't won an DSLR.

Tools and then practice!

You get better by taking multiple shots, refine them through Photoshop, publish it, learn from others...

Same applies to programs, create them, apply latest tools/techniques, seek feedback, refine them...

(Stop reading posts on here and FB and go read the programs written by the best programmers in the opensource... :-) )