I started in the dirtiest ugliest codebase imaginable. I worked on a MUD descended from DikuMUD (and originally written by native danish speakers). Seeing code that ugly that worked and making it better, faster and more readable gave me the confidence that I can make a significant impact. Moving into the professional world I found that corners are constantly cut and I can always clean up shoddy implementations and make them cleaner. I've gone on to be a developer, data architect, lead and manager and it's always great to find new experiences.
Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
41–50 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#42Under 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.
You can always tell a true senior developer by the overabundance of imposter syndrome they carry around with them. Green programmers can see their successes - experienced programmers can see their flaws... the best programmers I've ever met can intuit which parts of a green programmer's system probably have bugs by just listening to them talk about it and focus in on the parts they don't go into detail about.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#43Leaving my first job /s
and
Demo a wireframe in a gui builder to a visiting suit without him realising that it wasn't a fully-developed application.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#44A good mentor.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#45I have the opposite experience. I always thought I was a good programmer (self taught when I was a kid, then studied in a reputable place where I ranked among the best students). Then I confronted myself with the real world where I feel I'm not special, and that coding is only a small part of what we do. Apart from school or programming contests, we rarely get evaluated purely on our coding abilities, and there's always so much we don't know.
That being said, there are things that boosted my confidence, such as getting offers from FAANG. But it was temporary. Software engineering still seems like a tedious and hard activity. And it's getting worse now that everything is distributed.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#46Learning the syntax of my language really well.
Eh, I've worked in PHP for more than a decade professionally and I still need to double check the argument order for array_walk. The syntax of how we express ideas abstractly is probably a better thing to focus on than any specific details tied to the language.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#47When I wrote my first code that entered production and saw that it worked and produced value for my company, that's when I gained my first real confidence in my craft. And this still holds true, every time I put code into production that works flawlessly and is properly tested it gives me a boost.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#48Realise it doesn't work the first time for most people. Even really good people.
Also for me (very specific to people starting in late 90s) realising I wasn't the only person that thought forced 'object oriented' programming was bullshit. 25 years later this style has gone out of trend, and a lot of people realise that Alan Kay meant something more like the actor model than Java.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#49I'd been programming as a hobby for years, but I got my first internship at 20 years old and asked one of my first managers a pretty basic question about what I was working on, and instead of telling me what he wanted me to do he said "whatever you prefer, I trust your judgment". That one sentence didn't cost him a lot to say and I'm sure he didn't even remember it the next day, but it meant an awful lot to me.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#50Not a junior programmer for a couple of decades but of course I still venture into new areas and feel junior! Have to say that Chat GPT gives me a lot of confidence. I can ask it questions, bounce ideas off of it and get it to validate my thinking, design and code before shareing with anyone else. Confidence and overall anxiety has really improved in the last few months.