111–120 of 245 posts
Sounds like a joke but really, I felt super green until suddenly I didn’t. I didn’t really figure anything specific out, I’ve just now seen enough problems that I am confident I can work through whatever I run into.
It was while I was taking CS50 online that a programmer left the company where I'd been working (in a non-technical position). His manager was scrambling to re-distribute his workload, and knew that I'd started taking an online CS class. When he offered me some easy entry-level work, I'm sure I would've said "no" just months before. That was the exact moment when the class made a huge difference.
Now, the other side of that coin is realizing that, yes, I’ll eventually figure it out, but some of them will just be absolute misery to work through ;)
But eventually you emerge on the other side and you move on.
People who believe they are skilled can fuck shit up on a much bigger scale because they are a bit too confident. In reality, almost all code is crap. Understanding in what way your code is crap is healthy and useful. Believing that your code is good is not healthy.
I was just learning the relevant languages and jobs, so their response gave me confidence to keep trying things and learning.
Few notable things were the first time writing a ray tracer and seeing it work, writing a small emulator, writing a lisp etc. A lot of low level stuff. Learning what executables are made of on different operating systems, and so on. When you're going from not really understanding half of the stuff you use to building some of it from the bottom up, that was very valuable to me.
This helped me because I had to learn requirements, talk with people, understand dependencies, and not make people’s life harder. And I had sort of a value to smart seniors as I would maintain stuff that was hairy to change and not break it.
I also spent a lot of time on nights and weekends volunteering with the network people and hardware people and firewall people to understand how those components fit into the architecture.
Realizing 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…
This is indeed a superpower. I don't really remember when I felt that external dependencies were magic, but thinking about this, it explains a lot of the behavior I see on some developers who are very negative about the more challenging parts of the job. Some of them don't really believe the research stuff we do at work are even possible. They're constantly surprised when other devs finish those tasks. Some don't bel…