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Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
231–240 of 301 posts
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#232> Any project I work on is connected to a million different tools, workflows and services, I was just skimming and read that, and I thought "he is working in Javascript" and yep, later on that's it. I stay away from the Javascript/TS ecosystem (npm et al). I program mostly in Go, but also quite a bit in Typescript. I would learn/use (even if for personal projects) more boring tech stacks, like Java/C#/Go/PL-SQL/T-SQL…
No viable alternative to JS/TS for web (client side) unfortunately.
WASM?
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#233A couple of simple suggestions:
1. Learn a new language. Even if you don't expect to use it on the job, it can be exciting to spend time learning a new language and working basic practice examples in it. Depending on your employer, you may even be able to convince them to allow you to use some "professional development" time and resources at work to do this. Check to see if your employer has things like PluralSight access and if your manager would be interested in giving you 10%/20% time to professional education/learning. You may need to be able to market whatever language you pick as "potentially useful to future projects", but good managers often encourage a small bit of "professional development" time because it keeps you sharp (and that is good for them).
2. Find some reason to code for fun outside of work if you need it. Be careful with any attempts at moonlighting because the failure case is burn out (and possibly dangerous levels of burn out at that) and work/life balance is generally a good idea. As others have suggested you could build a hobby project of some sort, perhaps a game idea you might want to explore. If you want more "guide rails" (which might help to avoid some burn out by narrowing your focus) there are things like attempting Project Euler problems [1] or also a small category of Games on Steam where playing the game encourages/requires writing some of your own code. For instance, I've been playing some Bitburner [2] lately. It uses JS to "play" but you can start from a very stripped down "no toolchain, no frameworks" place and just explore/learn the game's API at your own pace with end goals already encouraged by the game structure. It may be an interesting anecdote to some of your current work struggles.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#234The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…
I think this passes the buck a little. There are a lot of problems created by software engineers and software engineers alone. There are of course management problems, but that happens in every field. Software isn't special in that regard. My issue with software is that, in general, the software industry is both myopic, clinging to some bygone coding aesthetic of the 80s, and discontented, constantly creating new stu…
I'm curious about your opinion on Git. It's actually a tool I'm excited to teach to non-developer people who deal with text documents and the need to keep a history, multiple versions etc. I'm aware that now these features are integrated in some common offices apps so there's less of a need for Git there.
However what's wrong about Git for code? How would you cover the same features differently? When I say "Git" I refer to all the ecosystem that's based on Git, including GUIs for those who don't like the command line
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#235"Beware of looking for goals. Look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life."
—Hunter S. Thompson
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#236The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…
This sounds like it's the tyranny of the bureaucracy. Here's an example of what I mean:
My kid takes the school bus to school. The bus is often late making my kid late. Mind you, my kid is at the bus stop an hour before school starts and school is only a 10 minute drive away. When this happens, my kid gets marked tardy and after 3, she gets a referral, even though it was the school that was responsible for her getting there on time. When she asked why, the response was, "it's policy."
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> " All of this, to dabble in code " I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't und…
Very reactionary take here. Blaming developers for everything that's wrong is just as bad-wrong as blaming everything on management, the C-suite, capitalism, or anything else. I've worked with some very ignorant, lazy, incompetent, individuals. Some had 'programmer' or 'developer' in their title, others were managers or product owners or QA, etc. etc. I do agree with your last point. I expect the real-world consequen…
There is nobody else who could have written good code, except developers. There is nobody else who kept rewriting X-Screensaver clones insecurely for 17 years[1] except developers. Nobody else who has knowledge or experience to standardise on tools for the greater good. There is nobody else who wrote Jira but developers. There is nobody else who only wants to do Electron, or who refuses things like UAC because security is fine on their OpenBSD ThinkPad.
Reddit blames capitalism, HN blames managmenent, 4chan blames 'Pajeet' Indian stereotype, Slashdot blames Microsoft, very few developers take a look in the mirror and say things like "we need less powerful languages"[2] or "ignore the firehose of new technologies"[3] or "If I want to ship my software, as opposed to just write it, I need to use tech that's a couple of clicks back from "bleeding edge," and spend a lot of time, "polishing the fenders. B O R I N G [but I do it]"[4].
Civil engineers have legal duties and responsibilities to make sure the things they build are fit for purpose and sign off on them before they get deployed, and can be personally fined or imprisoned or lose licenses if they weren't fit for purpose.
Want to make a text editor at home? Knock yourself out, pick any language you want, dabble all you like. Want to make something that handles millions of people's data, sign your name to it and put your professional reputation on the line before every release. And it may well make salaries go up for the people willing and able to do that. The world runs on a lot more code than buildings these days and professional developers with bleeding edge MacBooks Pro and six figure salaries complaining that all the software we all suffer under is shitty, is like civil engineers complaining that buildings fall down and it's all management's fault for demanding blueprints before construction and inspections during construction to try and stop the company buildings falling down so often, ugh all that red tape, can't we still use wattle and daub it works fine on my garden shed.
[Edit: just seen[5] comment from "Jon" "if you think 'function will crash if given invalid parameters' is a "defect" you should switch to Java". Nice sneer, right?]
[1] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/
[2] https://lukeplant.me.uk/blog/posts/less-powerful-languages/
[3] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[5] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8477965/is-kr-c-still-ap... comment from "Jon"
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is no value in constant-surveillance antivirus software on a modern Mac — if your IT requires this, run far, far away
As someone who works in IT, it is almost never up to IT what goes onto the Mac device. It's usually a compliance/legal ask, good luck explaining to a customer why you don't have anti-virus. Customer wants to see: Yes, Company X has Y anti-virus product on all devices.
What customers demand antivirus software for office workers who provide a service to a company who provides a service said customers?
You could say some certification requires it and customers demand that certification but that doesn't cover most cases.
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#239Maybe you want to try out Assembler programming/assembler-alike-freedom
or write your own prog lang
Re: Ask HN: I’m falling out of love with coding
#240The red tape is garroting us. My wife's dev environment VMs are 'remediated' at 8pm regardless if she's using them or not - there is no override policy - and the company is singing the success story of saving 40 dollars in licensing. At another corporation, it can take several weeks to learn how to fill out the IAM role and permission boundaries to allow a new app to run - and a governance board has to review it and…
> " All of this, to dabble in code " I'm not a professional programmer, and when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend (today!), I'm pointing fingers at you all, the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't und…
> when my laptop takes 10 minutes to start moving the mouse cursor smoothly after waking from a weekend suspend
Apologies for not reading your comment fully, but in this specific instance it's because a weekend suspend causes hibernation, which means all your RAM is saved to the disk. The file can be pretty large (same as your RAM, say 32GB) but reading it fully takes much longer (at 200MB/s it's three minutes). In order to wake up your computer quicker (a few seconds), instead of reading it fully to RAM, the memory is read on demand, i.e. when a process needs it. This comes at the cost of keeping your computer lagging for the next few minutes. This is just one of many many small engineering quirks that makes up an operating system. However considerate the developers work, tradeoffs have to be made here or there. You can't power off the computer and expect to restore its state fully within 5 seconds.
> the professional "dabblers" who don't understand computers, don't understand firewalls, don't understand databases, don't understand algorithms, don't understand garbage collectors, don't understand or care about any kind of security or legal compliance regulations
A single code base consists of many parts independently written by developers of all fields. There are CPU people, networking people, disk people, kernel people, compiler people, cryptography people, etc. And there are things that are simply not possible even if they work their best. There are developers that focus on making the operating system as safe and stable as possible, but they build aircrafts, cars, rockets and household applicances, which (from a software development perspective) are far less powerful than regular computers.
That said, the community of developers is indeed very bloated and there is no need for so many of them. We just haven't found a way to distribute money to that small set of necessary developers without compensating everyone else and bloating the company to keep talents away from competitors.