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Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

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Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#41

Post by jamisonbryant »

- Finding a framework or language that you truly love, and then getting to work in that platform as your day job, is pure excellence.

- Discovering new tools and adding them to your tool chain, but also understanding how to use them effortlessly because you have so much experience.

- Being able to build just about anything in a ridiculously quick amount of time (all things considered) because you've done so much already.

- Rather egotistically, being better than everybody else at something is pretty satisfying (at least to me).

These are the things that I find satisfying.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#42

Post by Mo3 »

polishdude20 wrote: post #26
Mo3 wrote: post #16

Good question. I have 10 years of professional experience under my belt now. 10 years before that, from the age of 10 I was spending 100% of my free time playing with and learning programming languages. I think an important piece to this puzzle lies in not getting attached to one specific field of application. Worked for about 3 years in a regular run-of-the-mill agency / website shop. Not very interesting, but good…

What was excruciating about working in e-commerce?

To add to what the previous commenter has stated which is absolutely on point, it is (might be a personal thing) work that is absolutely devoid of any real meaning or purpose.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#43

Post by smackeyacky »

walleeee wrote: post #28
smackeyacky wrote: post #6

35 years of coding. Edit actually its 40 this year whew. Making things nobody ever saw before (current role). Inventing a new kind of service nobody saw before that allows farmers to do things that were impossible. Taking a boring, time consuming part of somebodies day and making it disappear so they can do more interesting things. Occasionally hiding something fun in code that makes somebody smile. Mastery over thin…

Out of curiosity, what are you building for farmers?

SmartShepherd

https://www.smartshepherd.com.au

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#44

Post by polishdude20 »

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #32
polishdude20 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> having colleagues with good senses of humour and lively minds, (particularly the delightfully twisted silly jokes/banter people come up with after spending hours on weird abstract problems that are incomprehensible to most people How do you find coworkers like these? Haha.

dont join faang.

I'm not in faang :(

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#45

Post by karmakaze »

Been writing for many decades, from BASIC+machine/assembly language, C, COBOL, Pascal, C++, and more modern languages. The field of software development is still maturing and it's exciting to see it progress. The thing I like the most is seeing old great things become mainstream. Like union types in TypeScript and structural typing (in Go too), or F# type inference on .Net, or Clojure, or Racket, or Sorbet in Ruby, Wasm. Advances in tooling or ecosystems, git. Basically all the cool stuff here on HN that's up and coming.

Finding good ways to use all/any of those languages, frameworks, libraries to effectively and creatively solve problems is always an interesting challenge. Getting good at recognizing concepts early, finding the perfect names for everything, and knowing when not to create abstractions are all very rewarding things. Distributed systems. Continuously learning ways of structuring/writing to make it difficult to do the wrong things. It really doesn't end, I love the continuous learning/dopamine hits.

Learning to develop software well, is like learning to play Go (the board game) the skill ceiling seems so very high--and even if you think you might be getting close, there's new tech and hardware enabling-capabilities that extend that farther. You end up learning that there's more that you didn't know there was to learn.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#46

Post by karmakaze »

SeriousM wrote: post #24

I have 20 yrs now in mainly c# but also js,ts,sql,ruby,etc,etc,..... I really love the way how programming fits into my head and how I can remember quite every code I wrote though the years. What I hate is that I don't learn anything new, no matter how much I try to explore new concepts. Everything is a remix... But hey, now I have much more time to learn cyber security and piano :) Btw, I looooove the HN community s…

> don't learn anything new, no matter how much I try to explore new concepts

I'm sure there's more that you're not being exposed to. Distributed systems, functional programming, or Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP). Go, Rust, Pony, Clean are all interesting languages that do things differently. Elixir/Phoenix framework since you have Ruby background is also a neat twist. You can learn new things if you hang around the same neighbourhood (unless that's HN).

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#47

Post by karmakaze »

uberman wrote: post #5

I love the "ah-ha moments" where the complexity of a problem I thought was insurmountable fades away

Or those clever hacks, where it's a neat trick because you realize that some of those things you thought were fixed are actually under your control and messing around with them you discover something that was hard or impossible, pretty straight-forward actually.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#48

Post by karmakaze »

jka wrote: post #15

The excitement between successful compilation and running a program -- only to find out that it emits a stream of nonsense to the console instead of the answer you expect: but that's no problem, ctrl-c and back to the code. The satisfaction of opening a perfectly-tuned merge request with a minimal diff and glowing momentarily to yourself as tests all begin to pass (before realizing that there's an embarrassing typo i…

Yeah, the best times are when your creation/program does something that you didn't expect in a good way. Oh shit, I didn't know it could do that too! Like when an initial design keeps being built upon and on and on, and it doesn't seem to need much reformulation in its conceptualization, only specific updates (partitioning/caching) to keep its performance scalable.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#49

Post by karmakaze »

Automating stuff or finding creative ways to solve voluminous problems. E.g. contract to port many lines of Java to C++: parse the program with ANTLR, spit out the C++ code with some simple errors corrected manually. How to deal with no GC? return reference values copied up one stack-frame at a time, or pass down mutable structures. Another one was switching from Swift to Java (or the reverse I forget) but it had a huge test suite that also needed porting. Write a grammar, parse, translate the ASTs, unparse. Do it for the program and tests. Fixup all the compiler errors. Sure the parser, AST transforms and unparser could maybe only handle 40% of the language, but Pareto principle applies.

Re: Ask HN: Software devs with 10 years experience, what do you still love about it?

#50

Post by karmakaze »

gizmore wrote: post #31

Less is more :)

I think only last week I learned that my superpower is being able to solve problems that others find hard with surprisingly simple/compact solutions. I didn't realize how I was able to do this until I connected it to my motto: "What the simplest thing that could possibly work?" That sounds kinda dumb and short-sighted but really it's a corollary to "As simple as possible but not simpler."--if it were simpler than possible it wouldn't work.

After practicing this my entire career, I learned to instinctively find the smallest possible solutions. What this means is that as the problems get larger, I'm dealing with a much smaller solution space than others trying to solve the problem in a larger solution space. The other trick is not to limit the dimensions of your solution space, everything is fair game and 'in play'.

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