preface

When I was in high school, I didn’t study English well and my grades were always poor, about 60 points in every test. I flunked English several times in college. After college graduation, engaged in the programmer this industry. There are a lot of different opinions about whether a programmer needs to know English. Some people say, “A programmer doesn’t need to know English. When he gets to the company, he needs to write his business logic.” . Some people say, “English is very important to programmers. If you learn English well, your skills will grow faster.” Every time I heard a different statement, I would become hesitant about whether I should spend time to improve my English.

I have been working for about 5 years, knocking on the code for 5 years, and gradually realized the importance of learning English well for programmers. If I want to achieve a relatively high level of my own technology, a good command of English is indispensable. You can say: “good English programmer is not necessarily technical, but technical excellent programmer must be good English!”

Now LET me summarize, in the process of these five years, what situation was English to wear small shoes, so determined to learn English well.

Use English scenes

  1. When I graduated in 2017, I learned Android, and the official document was in English.
  2. In 2018, the company will use Flutter. There are not many companies using Flutter in China, and there are few references and learning materials for Flutter. The official documents of Flutter are also in English.
  3. Programmers can’t live without StackOverFlow and Github. When you run into a problem or bug, you can quickly find the answer on StackOverFlow. Github is the world’s largest “gay friends” community (with all kinds of third-party open source libraries for us to learn from, borrow from, and use).

Ask questions and solutions on StackOverFlow in English. Lift to ask:Answer:

Github wiki documentation is also in English:

Issued in English as well:

  1. Not admitted to a good university, the teacher’s level is uneven, he did not study well. After graduation, I realized that my basic skills of specialized courses were not solid enough, so I wanted to practice my “internal skills”. B: There are open courses of Stanford and MIT on the website. We want to learn, but the lecturers speak English. It is too uncomfortable to understand them.
  • MIT: Principles of computer composition

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1kU4y177x9

  • MIT: Operating systems

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1QA411F7ij"

  • Stanford University: Computer networking

https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV137411Z7LR

  1. At the beginning of 2021, I joined a new company. The company asked me to investigate the background technical framework such as Verx and Ktor. These two are relatively new frameworks, and I could only read English documents and use translation software, which sometimes failed to express my ideas. This piece of technology is different from other, often a wrong translation in one place, will mislead us, even put us around the pit. The four main developers of the Open source library, Verx, are all in Discord. If you don’t know Discord, you can directly ask the author a question. If you can’t speak English, you can only stare.

conclusion

As programmers, the situations in which we use English can be broadly divided into the following aspects:

  1. Computer technology, The United States is the most powerful, we want to obtain the latest technical knowledge, it is unavoidable to read English documents. To learn a language well, one cannot avoid reading through official English documents.
  2. For some bugs or problems encountered during development, I used Google (to describe the problems in English as much as possible) instead of Baidu, and searched StackOverFlow or other foreign blogs (such as Medium) for answers to the problems. (Baidu’s search for technical questions is far from Google’s, and blogs like CSDN in China are simply copying, wasting too much time trying to find answers to questions)
  3. When using a third party library, the best way is to communicate directly with the developer of the library. This time, you need to express your questions clearly in English, and also want to be able to understand the answers.
  4. Spare time, want to recharge their batteries, watch some famous universities open courses, or YouTobe on some good courses.