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Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#31

Post by PaulRobinson »

Shipping and getting to see customers using and enjoying what did not exist before I typed it into being.

A simple CRUD app is magic to the average user, if it does something they haven’t seen done in software before - and that could be as simple as some calcs in a custom domain.

The first customer who tells you “this is great”, if it’s anything like my experience, changes everything.

It also helped that some of my early forays were to clean up code by a guy ten years my senior which was rammed with bugs - fixing those one by one was satisfying and helped me earn trust with my team and in myself.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#32

Post by specproc »

I'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 small a role most devs in "serious" set ups have. I've learned a really broad range of skills because I've had to.

There's always going to be more things to learn, but looking back every once in a while can put things in perspective a bit.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#33

Post by hu3 »

What boosted my confidence as a new programmer?

1) Ignorance. Knowing just enough to be dangerous was great against analysis-paralysis.

2) Positive feedback from clients. Clients didn't care about my spaghetti code. All they saw was a solution to their problem. That was very rewarding and made me confident. Well, at least until a senior dev took a look at my code and rightfully destroyed my confidence with not-so-polite suggestions.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#34

Post by Izkata »

I can't speak for myself (it's been too long and I'm self-taught so I was already fairly confident at my first job), but a former co-worker did have an interesting insight at one point:

They came straight from a bootcamp and for months felt like they weren't getting better, were constantly asking questions about stuff. It only finally clicked and they gained confidence when we got a second out-of-bootcamp developer and the first person was the one that was constantly answering their questions. They hadn't realized how much they were learning because their only comparison had been those of us who had been there a lot longer.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#35

Post by comprev »

When experienced developers/colleagues started to use tools I created as part of their workflows. Occasionally they'd submit PRs demonstrating more efficient solutions, which helped me enormously, but overall the tools remained untouched.

It was also a great reminder that "good enough" is just that.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#36

Post by rjbwork »

wing-_-nuts wrote: post #14
mindfulmark wrote: post #8

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…

Adding to this, the decompiler built in to many ides really up'd my game understanding underlying libs. How they work, what methods to call, etc. Very helpful! As much as people trash java this is a really nice feature. I'm sure other languages have decompilers as well, but I've never seen anything close for c# for example.

>I'm sure other languages have decompilers as well, but I've never seen anything close for c# for example.

Dotpeek is integrated into Rider and is a world class decompiler. It also integrates into Visual Studio either standalone, or with ReSharper.

You can also integrate external source symbol servers into your IDE of choice as well that will let you debug into libraries seamlessly.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#38

Post by foobiekr »

Under confidence is extremely rare in new and inexperienced coders.

For me, what really boosted my confidence long term was getting yelled at by people who actually knew what they were doing because I sure didn’t. But that ended up being more of a bathtub curve of confidence.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#39

Post by amai »

Another programmer showed me what he was working on. He tried to implement a driver for some badly documented virtual hardware, but couldn’t figure out, why the set of bytes he used didn’t work. I knew about big and little endian and suggested to simply turn the order of the bytes around. It worked immediately and I had solved a problem that had him puzzled for some days. This gave me confidence that despite my little coding experience at that time I could still make a positive impact.
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