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

In the case of Java at least, what helps is that the IDE can decompile the code or, which is often even more helpful, download the source code and allow you to step through it while debugging, at least if a source JAR was published (which is pretty often the case).

In the case of non-compiled languages, of course you don't even need this step since all your libs exist in source form already, so it was pretty simple for me to step through Ruby library code with a simple debugger and no fancy IDE.

I have a habit of sometimes debugging even horribly abstract framework (e.g. Spring) code when I don't understand what it's doing. That's maybe not the most efficient method, but it does usually make me understand why thing X is not working the way I expected it to work.

Not knowing how to do it and reading and failing until I figured it out. Repeat for 15 years to become a skilled crafts person.

Everyone you consider "great" at something had mentors who helped them get there. One of the biggest differences between me now, and me when I was new to software engineering, is that now I ask a lot more questions.

When I was new, I was insecure about seeming like I didn't know certain things and wanted to "prove myself", so to speak, so I would keep my head down and try to figure things out for myself.

Over time I've realized that leaning on others with more expertise than you is how you learn and grow, and asking questions and collaborating with others does not reflect poorly on you as an engineer (quite the opposite in fact).

These realizations are what have boosted my confidence - I know that if I'm ever working on something that I don't know how to do, I can go talk to someone who does know and learn something new. If you don't work somewhere where this is possible (i.e. you're always the "smartest guy in the room", as they say) then your growth as an engineer is going to be limited.

A petty one: seeing people interview and bomb on simple questions.

I was officially employed as a help-desk tech while I was going to school for CS. I wrote some internal-only software we used to track all of the installed software on all the hosts in our network and catalog them to a database. This was in 2000, so there weren't very many software packages that you could run like that would crawl the entire org and catalog the software installed without installing an agent on people's systems. This worked that way, and my VP came and asked me to help a team package it up so we could sell it as another product from my company. Looking back, what I wrote was crap, but boy was that a boost in the breeches, if you know what I mean.