191–200 of 245 posts
About four years after he reviewed a series of changes me and two coworkers put together to rework this handling.
When you see your code in action in the real world and know the impact it can have, you gain a new respect for developers who are conscientious about their work, and also that software exists to make something else function.
Which is why I am not sure I agree with the view that dynamic languages are good for beginners, I think beginners need a third wheel, an IDE that understands your code and can tell you with confidence that you can't do "a+b" in this context. For that it needs to know what a and b are.
It made me realise that good engineers don't have any mysterious unknown tool or advantage, they're just relentless researchers when trying to solve their problem (i.e. using Google, Wikipedia, API docs)
Even the most incredible 10x engineer has at some point done the stupidest thing you can imagine: deleted a prod database, set a server on fire, pushed that one simple single line fix that took down several downstream services, and so on.
Those stories and learnings are the ones that turned the stubble-chinned doe-eyed juniors of yore into the full-bearded crusty Gandalfs we love, that seem to know everything and solve problems in a finger snap.
If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. The amount of politics, power jockeying, engineers who hide behind decisions as if they were technical only to be highly personal preferences, how many people reject simplicity and prefer complexity while calling it simple, lack of documentation, etc. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…
For me it was doing nand2tetris. With just NAND gates and D flip flops as primitives, building a full 16bit ALU, then an ISA for it, an assembler, compiler, operating system (with memory mapped keyboard and screen) and interpreter. Then writing a Sudoku game in that interpreted language, and seeing it reduce all the way to just bits. And then running it on the simulated computer. Really have a holistic view of what a…