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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#601

Post by jorvi »

eru wrote: post #475
ayewo wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The steps in this witty quote helps puts things in perspective as what anyone should do first when in doubt: "Make it work, make it correct, make it fast".

And the 'fast' can be optional. But sometimes you already have something that works, is correct and fast, but you still want to simplify: for example, when understanding _why_ that code is correct is too annoyingly complicated to explain and understand.

I deeply hate this modern attitude.

It’s factually correct due to hardware and compilers (néé transpilers) offering so much headroom, but part of me cries when you compare modern hardware utilization compared to how optimized-to-the-gills late generation PS2 games were.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#602

Post by [deleted] »

audiodude wrote: post #593
icelancer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.

YES! Couldn't agree more. Although my title has always been Software Engineer, I never introduce myself that way (I prefer Software Developer or just Programmer, or I say "I write code at XYZ"). I went to an engineering school. Actual engineers design bridges and machines and biochemical whatnot, and of course require licensing. I push code around. I even try to subvert company culture and say things like "Well devel…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#603

Post by jnsie »

khazhoux wrote: post #587
jnsie wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious as to why you stopped (feel free to tell me to mind my own business!)?

Ha. The real question is why I didn't just hold. That $50K would now be like $10 million.

Been there with longer term trades. Bought some DXCM back in 2014 and sold later for a small profit. Was trading at $8-9. I used their continuous glucose monitor (am type 1 diabetic) and was certain they would be successful. Sitting at around $115 a share right now.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#604

Post by phkahler »

lloeki wrote: post #329
fifilura wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Honest question) What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?

Microservices provide encapsulation and an API interface, but are not composable the way Unix programs are when e.g called by a Unix shell on a Unix OS. Either microservice A calls into microservice B or there's a glue service calling into both A and B. Either way there's some deep API knowledge and serious development needed. Compare with a (admittedly trivial, but just doing that is orders of magnitude less complex…

>> Microservices provide encapsulation and an API interface, but are not composable the way Unix programs are when e.g called by a Unix shell on a Unix OS.

Because the Unix programs all use pipes as their interface. When you simplify and standardize the "API" composition becomes easy. Microservices are more like functions or modules each running as separate processes - if you use the same language for the services and glue you can just compile them all together and call it a program right?

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#605

Post by dunham »

bitwize wrote: post #348
jonplackett wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must have absolutely nailed the rest of the interview!

It was the early nineties. If you've touched a computer, companies would assume that any skill gap you had you could straightforwardly bridge yourself, on the job. It wasn't like today where you have to be a perfect cinnamon roll of a candidate who ticks all of HR's required-skill checkboxes before you can move on to the grueling 5-6 rounds of interviews.

I do remember seeing job listings around '96 calling for 5 years of experience with windows '95.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#606

Post by khazhoux »

jnsie wrote: post #603
khazhoux wrote: post #587

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ha. The real question is why I didn't just hold. That $50K would now be like $10 million.

Been there with longer term trades. Bought some DXCM back in 2014 and sold later for a small profit. Was trading at $8-9. I used their continuous glucose monitor (am type 1 diabetic) and was certain they would be successful. Sitting at around $115 a share right now.

I used to get upset by things like that, until I realized that everyone(-ish) has a similar story.

Still, it's amazing that for all the hours of work I put in, day in and day out for years, I could have amassed 10x more money if I had just done "nearly nothing" at a couple of key moments.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#607

Post by geocrasher »

I was explaining to a coworker that my Contigo brand coffee travel mug was a great mug except that it was just impossible to clean properly. I explained to him that as a result, I had forcefully removed the guts to my mug lid.

In the midst of explaining this, I showed him which mug it was on the manufacturers website (we were remote- this was all via Slack) and as I did so, I saw the animation that explains how to disassemble it for cleaning.

oof.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#608

Post by ahfeah7373 »

mablopoule wrote: post #96
hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper. It was code that was well-architected, had well-conci…

That's such a good quote, haven't heard that before

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#609

Post by vzaliva »

tasuki wrote: post #290
vzaliva wrote: post #286

It's a longer story, but the gist is that one night I got a call saying some code I'd written wasn’t working properly, and they wanted me to come and fix it. When I tried to refuse, I was told they would send someone to break down my door and drag me, kicking and screaming, to fix it. The threat was very real. This was an important lesson for me: you should always be ready to take responsibility for what you write.

I guess I'm interested in hearing why you think your employer would actually break your door and drag you to fix a bug. Was it a mafia organisation or something?

It was in the nineties, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, and there was a fair amount of lawlessness. Many shops had their own security, often from criminal organizations. The shop I wrote accounting software for had such goons on the payroll.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#610

Post by ahfeah7373 »

bane wrote: post #590

I've had a few humble pie experiences: When I was young I set myself on a path to become a professional string musician. I practiced relentlessly and sat section lead and first chair in about 4 different school and local orchestras. I was relatively well known as the studious musician kid and there were some hopes that I was "going to go all the way". Then I had a rough tryout for a regional orchestra, made it, but s…

How did you handle accepting your dreams would never happen?
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