Launching the first somewhat useful product that I had worked on very nearly from the ground up, as part of a real team including people who actually knew what they were doing. In hindsight, my contributions were more trivial and janky than I thought at the time, but nevertheless they were in there, in a non trivial working product. It showed me that it's not magic, it's actually possible to build things and make them work.
Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
121–130 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#122As a new programmer? Nothing. Fear of inadequacy was a constant companion. Over the years, though, as I saw more and more code written by programmers I respect and from companies I respect, I noticed that mine was no worse than theirs -- and I realized that my skills were, at the minimum, just fine. Warts and all. (Edited to swap "mine" and "theirs" to be what I meant to say)
I think this is big. I still try to be humble and consider myself to be nothing higher than a novice. When I do see things that I can quickly understand and even improve on, it's a huge boost to my morale.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#123Working with people and getting feedback. Initially code reviews have many comments, then slowly less and less, then you start reviewing others, finding the same issues you used to have.
Eventually you get enough general knowledge to pick up almost anything and figure it out.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#124You might need the equivalence of a solo flight for a student pilot. You fly 3 take offs and landings by yourself as a confidence building step.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#125Realizing 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…
Funny thing was I never even thought to do this until I was working on a very strange bug, and a senior engineer at my company suggested I look at the source code for one of our dependencies. Sometimes really obvious and basic advice can be a big step for people.
Yeah I think it's helpful to recognize that this isn't always obvious to people, even folks who seem like they'd instinctively do so–I had a similar experience a year or two into being a professional programmer, despite being someone whose first experience with dependencies years beforehand was downloading Perl files and directly editing them.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#126I am still a novice programmer, if you call a recent graduate that. I feel stupid all the time. I don't know anything about almost everything, and the little I do know about, I'm sure it's less than what I think it is. I don't know how a GAN works. I haven't the faintest clue about machine learning. Someone asked me 'hey, you have a CS degree, tell me how ChatGPT works.' I couldn't answer that. I never took databases…
> Someone asked me 'hey, you have a CS degree, tell me how ChatGPT works.' I couldn't answer that.
Did you mention to them that they're a clown?
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#127I'm a self-taught one-man show, and just in the process of onboarding a new, more experienced colleague. In some ways it's terrifying, as I know a lot of my work is trash. On the other, recapping everything I've achieved myself, with no CS degree and nothing but Google to guide me has made me feel oddly proud. From doing the recruitment and chatting to my new colleague, I've really gotten an understanding of how smal…
As someone who is on the same path as you, many years/hours behind, thanks for sharing.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#128The best hackers I saw learned some turing complete system when they were children without having been taught the concept of programming. I guess for them "take the first step from being a tinkerer to being a skilled craftman" was when they learned that there is a whole field of study for bending those turing complete systems to your will. Then they spend like one day or week binge reading a programming book and unde…
What sort of Turing complete systems are you thinking of?
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#129First real programming lesson was tic-tac-toe. I figured out a more efficient logic flow than the one proposed by the teacher.
More recently: Realising that the two senior guys who had been there for 20 years had basically created an incomprehensible clown car of spaghetti code that not even they understood.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#130For me it was when I was able to complete a task that involved a lot of pieces outside of my normal daily flow.
I started as a full stack co-op, but 95% of the work was React. Then we wanted to implement Cypress to do fully E2E testing.
That led my to dig into CI (Circle), Docker, AWS, Redshift, Security Groups, networking. To make the test truly end-to-end, we had to spin up about a dozen containers, several databases, connect to Redshift. All those things were very, very strange to me and very scary.
Luckily nobody wanted to touch those things, so the task was up for grabs and my manager allowed my to try (since I was a co-op, there was not a lot of pressure to deliver other projects).
When I was done I realized that I was not just a JS/React dev, but I could dig in to other complex things and figure them out. My confidence shot through the roof and after that I wanted to work on all big projects available. Ended up switching to a backend team that does completely different tasks from my original one.