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Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
91–100 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#92Mh, I'm not new anymore, but there is one thing that's a huge confidence booster.
Someone coming around with a pull request going "Heyjo. I needed new X in your project. And, I looked at it and X and tests for X just slotted right in there. Can you take a quick look if that's right?"
I consider these easily and obviously extensible workhorse code bases my best work, even if after a certain point, I may have built like 10% of the thing and shouldn't consider it my thing anymore.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#93I am still a novice programmer, if you call a recent graduate that. I feel stupid all the time. I don't know anything about almost everything, and the little I do know about, I'm sure it's less than what I think it is. I don't know how a GAN works. I haven't the faintest clue about machine learning. Someone asked me 'hey, you have a CS degree, tell me how ChatGPT works.' I couldn't answer that. I never took databases…
Honestly, what you're describing would be common to almost any software engineer I know at least. The entire world of computer science, programming and software is VAST. You're only going to know about a tiny bit of it. A physicist doesn't know all of physics in depth, a doctor only has a surface level understanding of most things, and deeper knowledge of a few. Our field is the same. You're going to get to know your little niche, and bits and pieces of others.
As for tooling, if Windows and Visual Studio work then great. Vim is just a tool.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#94Realizing 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…
Relatedly, understand the frameworks that you build upon.
For React devs, this means learning how React actually works under the hood.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#95For me it was more like the opposite, over time my confidence turned into wisdom, empathy and experience; I feel like confidence is was more of a prerequisite.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#96Deploying my pet project on a Linux virtual server.
At that time I worked with some enterprise software on Windows, and any particular setup was so fragile, that it caused anxiety to touch anything and learned helplessness preventing experimentation. It didn't help that built-in diagnostic tools on Windows in the XP era were virtually non-existent.
Linux VMs in contrast were (and are) disposable, have all their guts exposed, and CLI is your only way of doing things. You're welcome to experiment, and basically forced to automate.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#97[dead]
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#98When I was finishing my internship at around 19 years old, on the last day a few colleagues did the whole card signing business.
A close colleague - a team lead of a different team who I had worked with a lot, went to a couple dev conventions and meetups with, and agreed with on a many facets of software dev and life in general, signed the card as so:
> It starts with a dream. Don't stop.
Many many years later, I still think about it often. Sometimes, all it takes is a little faith.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#99When I was finishing my internship at around 19 years old, on the last day a few colleagues did the whole card signing business. A close colleague - a team lead of a different team who I had worked with a lot, went to a couple dev conventions and meetups with, and agreed with on a many facets of software dev and life in general, signed the card as so: > It starts with a dream. Don't stop. Many many years later, I sti…
Really nice sentiment, make sure you pay it forward; we need more dreamers in CS
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#100As a novice programmer, getting my runescape guild mining bot to keep working longer than a day was the first step, and possibly still my greatest achievement.