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Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

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Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#131

Post by driton »

bflesch wrote: post #81
driton wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Don't use the next big thing before actually understanding the benefits only because someone else tells you to. (Looking at you, Angular and Docker!) I'm curious, what do you not like about Docker?

I followed the call of an employee with 10yrs more experience than I have and he proposed we move our infrastructure towards docker containers for easier deployment / management. Generally containerization of our app was a good step at this point, but we made the mistake to also put redis / postgresql into docker, which obviously is an stupid idea if you're trying to scale things. On top of that, docker networking wa…

Thank you for the thorough reply!

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#132

Post by unit91 »

kzisme wrote: post #113
maxxxxx wrote: post #102

Work somewhere where software is the main product and not just a cost center. You can learn a lot quickly if you do cutting edge things with people who care about technology and not just cost. Solve real world​ problems. Doing elegant things is very difficult because the real world is much more convoluted than theory. Do a few things in depth. Don't jump at the latest thing every few months.

> Work somewhere where software is the main product So a software company as opposed to working in an IT department - programming and solving problems that really _aren't_ interesting? That's one of the main things I crave these days (and I think it would make a big day-to-day difference) is to work at a software company as opposed to a company who leverages software.

Agreed, though I'd modify "software company as opposed to working in an IT department" to "work on something profitable". :-)

I don't work at a software company, or even a traditional "tech" company, but I write the software that powers our most profitable product. Since I'm the odd-man-out, and the higher-ups love org charts, they stuck me in the IT department. Net effect: IT just became a profit center and everybody in the company knows it.

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#133

Post by rhubarbcustard »

inlineint wrote: post #106
arethuza wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly agree. However, there are special cases where you are exposed to a new technology which enables new outcomes. I was fortunate enough to blunder into using the Web in '92 and Java in early '95 and they were tools where the "how" did matter quite a lot... [NB I haven't touched Java in a dozen years or so]

Also there are differences in further employment perspectives. I mean if you have a problem to solve and you have a choice to use some old tech that you already know, but it is going out fashion, and some new one, then the choice of the newer one improves your employability in the future. For example, I guess in 2000 there was not that much people with 5 years of experience of using Java in production, but those who…

That is true and can be a problem when recruiters just keyword match technologies from your CV.

When I've recruited I've always tried to assess the candidate on ability to get things done rather than knowing a specific framework. I'd look at how deep their knowledge goes and see if they can ship stuff - if they've been using jQuery but I need React then I'm not too fussed if they've shipped quality products using jQuery and have taken the time to learn pretty deeply how it works, the keenness to learn and ability to build things should easily translate to React and I'd rather have this person that someone who has skimmed the top of React for a few Hello Worlds.

I would hope and prey that interviewers would take a similar approach, if they are just ticking off keywords from your CV then it's a pain.

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#135

Post by 1001101 »

- Find the tools that work with you to improve quality and productivity, for me that's: Syntastic Vim plugin (with 4x C/C++ linters), cscope, valgrind, asan

- If you do something more than once, automate it. Create a script, write a bash alias, something

- Keep reading; Go to conferences; Get a subscription to O'Reilly Safari - worth every penny; It's easy to become a dinosaur as a programmer

- Step through every line in your code - TDD is a good way to do this (corollary: figure out a good TDD methodology for your workflow).

Good luck!

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#137

Post by kzisme »

unit91 wrote: post #132
kzisme wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Work somewhere where software is the main product So a software company as opposed to working in an IT department - programming and solving problems that really _aren't_ interesting? That's one of the main things I crave these days (and I think it would make a big day-to-day difference) is to work at a software company as opposed to a company who leverages software.

Agreed, though I'd modify "software company as opposed to working in an IT department" to "work on something profitable". :-) I don't work at a software company, or even a traditional "tech" company, but I write the software that powers our most profitable product. Since I'm the odd-man-out, and the higher-ups love org charts, they stuck me in the IT department. Net effect: IT just became a profit center and everybod…

> something profitable

Would that be the primary product of your company, or something that empowers other employees to work faster, and push _their_ products more easily?

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#138

Post by davotoula »

Test driven development.

Continuous integration first - first line of code second.

Understanding that writing code is a small percentage of my day - then there is testing, designing, writing docs, deploying, automating, infrastructure configuring, discussing with stakeholders,

Learning multiple languages - especially from different families (procedural, functional, scripting, low level, etc).

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#139

Post by bflesch »

ianleeclark wrote: post #95
bflesch wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I followed the call of an employee with 10yrs more experience than I have and he proposed we move our infrastructure towards docker containers for easier deployment / management. Generally containerization of our app was a good step at this point, but we made the mistake to also put redis / postgresql into docker, which obviously is an stupid idea if you're trying to scale things. On top of that, docker networking wa…

I'm really not the biggest fan of docker, but it seems like everything y'all did was wrong: improper image caching, so you wouldn't have to continually build the same base images for your services; putting databases in the container, instead of somewhere else; not using cgroups/docker fundamentals to restrict space on the container level; storing state (something) on disk within a container.

You're right, there was a lot of PEBKAC involved. But it was not very straightforward to do the right thing in that situation.

The engineer in question was very excited about the technology, so we went with it. In the end it was a great learning on many levels, and I can really appreciate the kind of problems that AWS solves for you.

Re: Ask HN: For those programming 10+ years, what do you wish you knew 4 years in?

#140

Post by jackmott »

I spent a long time never bothering to master semi-advanced text editor or ide features. Like really simple stuff like moving forward/back by a word at a time, deleting a word at a time, hopping to next/prev brace/paren, renaming globally, doing everything without needing the mouse, multi-select etc.

You can go even deeper and get into deep VIM style skills but there are many very easy things to learn that let you do stuff so much faster. Whatever editor your use, learn to use it.

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