111–120 of 126 posts
Additionally, many individuals in our industry have zero life outside of hacking on their software. It's difficult if not impossible to be competitive with someone spending every waking hour practicing their craft without doing the same.
While this doesn't directly answer your question, but I've found edw519 (a fellow HNer's) past comments on this subject highly enlightening. If you're looking for something inspiring / actionable to read, checkout this collection by him http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.html One of my favorite answers - 71. How do you get good at programming? I believe that there are two ways to get good at anything, "push"…
I am a regular employee with fairly well defined role in the team, which means that new problems to crack an learn from don't come that often.
On the other hand, we have knowledge-shares, lunch-n-learns, tech-talks, lightning-talks and even cooperate with local universities to teach some course-work :-)
this rings as very fake and/or blatantly self-promotional. I wish HN had less of this type of post. I feel like a certain percentage of HN posters have learned how to push enough of the buttons of the rest of you to make it a net win for them. just nauseating. And now come the downvotes, because I know I am effectively "not allowed" to express this kind of opinion without penalty -- yet I don't care, let's burn it up…
Self-promotional for what? I have no affiliation with any of the frameworks or apps I mentioned, and I'm getting exactly the kind of advice I was hoping for.
I think most developers feel crap about their own creations and I think all creatives struggle when comparing themselves to their role models. There is always a more skilled fish I guess :)
I am in my late 40's, I have been coding since I began uni in 1987, I have a Computer Science degree. When I got out there 25+ years ago I was all about doing things the best way, code reuse, refactor etc to get things just right. Most younger devs are. It took so much time getting the environments perfect, unit tests, etc. The customer paid for that, my managers must have been tearing their hair out watching us faff…
I'm about your age, and I agree with everything here. My "process" is thinking through problems thoroughly and being careful. I used to be able to find whole teams full of people who worked like this, and during that time I worked on at least 5 outrageously successful, stable products, with no automated tests and no process other than test it manually and check it in. Eventually, time moved on and (mostly younger) pe…
I am in my late 40's, I have been coding since I began uni in 1987, I have a Computer Science degree. When I got out there 25+ years ago I was all about doing things the best way, code reuse, refactor etc to get things just right. Most younger devs are. It took so much time getting the environments perfect, unit tests, etc. The customer paid for that, my managers must have been tearing their hair out watching us faff…
I'm about your age, and I agree with everything here. My "process" is thinking through problems thoroughly and being careful. I used to be able to find whole teams full of people who worked like this, and during that time I worked on at least 5 outrageously successful, stable products, with no automated tests and no process other than test it manually and check it in. Eventually, time moved on and (mostly younger) pe…
Programming is a practice that can be kind of deceptive in its valuation. To analogize to weightlifting, one of my favorite things to analogize against, you can see that someone lifted a lot, and you see that they did in fact lift it all by themselves, but you don't see how they get to that point, and you can't simply put on the same number of plates on the bar and hope to succeed. A likewise naive path is to copy ex…
This bears repeating a hundred times over. All the more pertinent today when there is an endless stream of shiny web UI frameworks that constantly tempt all but the most disciplined and hardy devs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We agree generally. The OP doesn't need to code more, they need to think more deeply, with more purpose. They probably should actually write less code.
This definitely sounds right. But is this from your experience ?