Funnily enough, getting bugged by some random people about a bug in one of my projects. I'd built projects before, mostly for the fun of making them, and occasionally for my own use. The first time someone reached out to me on Discord going "Hey, love your tool, but this feature hangs my machine" was a wake-up call that I had actually succeeded in making something useful.
Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
11–20 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#12[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#13I can tell you what limited my confidence as a programmer. It was correctness, or knowing how to deal with stuff so I don't have to check every line of code once I implemented something new that uses the old stuff in a novel way. For some people, it was apparent right away, but I had to discover that once you design something that works in all cases, you don't have to check wether it works as a part of newer code flow, or bigger use case. Only then my confidence started to compound.
In the late 90s to early 2010s it was fashionable to think of code as a graph of dependencies, and as long as you honor those dependencies when changing the code you would be ok. This is simplifying but pernicious POV IMO - reinforced by the zeitgeist that code is truth and comments (in code or otherwise) may not be. This is a cul-de-sac.
Unless developers see things as nouns or verbs, they don't acquire the ability to scale and see the bigger picture, because there is nothing to hold these smaller entities and connections between them (O(entities^2)). The concepts are the bags. Wish someone would explicitly teach us these things, because, sure as hell they didn't teach it in college.
May be people who have a liberal arts background are good at seeing these things, because one of the things they explicitly study is perspective, framing etc. Engineering is quite limited because we don't explicitly study about that.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#14Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…
Adding to this, the decompiler built in to many ides really up'd my game understanding underlying libs. How they work, what methods to call, etc. Very helpful! As much as people trash java this is a really nice feature. I'm sure other languages have decompilers as well, but I've never seen anything close for c# for example.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#15When I fully understood that impressive code that I was reading online was written by a real person, and that as a fellow real person, I should be able to learn to understand and write similar code. I experienced this when I was doing DailyProgrammer challenges from Reddit in highschool. I was doing most of my programming in Java at the time, but much of the Java solutions that I saw were using Java 8 features that looked alien to me. Realizing that it was not alien, and would just take time to learn, was a massive confidence boost for me for some reason.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#16For me it was reviewing code and seeing a ton of diffs - to help realize the incremental change nature of coding and seeing small pieces of code in relative isolation
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#17There’s no “right way” when you’re a learner.
You’ll gain confidence when you realize you can just hack away until it works and that is OK.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#18I think working on a lot of small changes across different areas of a project and starting to feel momentum.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#19I just worked through making a 2D physics engine via Gustavo Pezzi's course on pikuma.com
Seeing shapes collide, bounce, roll, and understand exactly what was happening in the code I wrote was a huge confidence booster.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#20Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…
Adding to this, the decompiler built in to many ides really up'd my game understanding underlying libs. How they work, what methods to call, etc. Very helpful! As much as people trash java this is a really nice feature. I'm sure other languages have decompilers as well, but I've never seen anything close for c# for example.
>I've never seen anything close for c# for example
If you highlight a method you call from external code and hit CTRL + F12, Visual Studio will automatically decompile it for you.