Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Salute to Solo Programmers

mondaynote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 84 posts

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#41

Post by codeshaman »

westoncb wrote: post #19

I've been doing the (unpaid) solo thing for years, and I'm almost sure I'm gonna give it up now. I built Tiled Text ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be... ) while working at a grocery store and dealing with a repetitive strain injury, and it was a miserable, awful experience. I designed and built this 'abstract visual debugger': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE while my savings s…

Those are cool projects !

The abstract visual debugger is how I imagine people will be doing development in the future. Real time, interactive manipulation of objects which represent parts of the program.

Have you considered applying it to a LISP language, like Clojure ?

I've played a bit with building an experimental lisp editor, which doesn't use textual editing, but graphical representation of the forms, pictograms and symbols for core function calls (like map, reduce, filter, sum, etc), 'slots' for function parameters/call arguments, etc. And it doesn't force you to use your mouse, but allows fast keyboard navigation and various commands for slurping/barfing forms, vi-style.

Eventually, I thought, this should be built in 3D. But I didn't finish it as it was too much work, just played around with the idea.

The cool thing about doing it for Clojure, is that, like any lisp, it can be evaluated in real time and the results animated immediately without restarting the app.

Your visual debugger is making inroads into the same territory I think.

Would you like to explore this idea a bit further together ?

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#42

Post by westoncb »

codeshaman wrote: post #41
westoncb wrote: post #19

I've been doing the (unpaid) solo thing for years, and I'm almost sure I'm gonna give it up now. I built Tiled Text ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tztmgCcZaM4&feature=youtu.be... ) while working at a grocery store and dealing with a repetitive strain injury, and it was a miserable, awful experience. I designed and built this 'abstract visual debugger': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvfMthDInwE while my savings s…

Those are cool projects ! The abstract visual debugger is how I imagine people will be doing development in the future. Real time, interactive manipulation of objects which represent parts of the program. Have you considered applying it to a LISP language, like Clojure ? I've played a bit with building an experimental lisp editor, which doesn't use textual editing, but graphical representation of the forms, pictogram…

The debugger has a client/server architecture that would make it relatively easy to connect to most languages (server does the rendering and layout stuff, client provides 'monitored' data structures, and sends data structure operations to the server). The clients are pretty easy to write.

Your experimental lisp editor sounds neat. I'm unfamiliar with slurping/barfing, haha.

I might've been interested in some shared exploring in the past, but I really am giving this stuff up for the time being. If you want to share a demo or discuss some particular idea sometime, or something, I can be reached here, though: westoncb[at google's mail service]

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#43

Post by codeshaman »

It's an interesting period. On one hand, even though the complexity of the app has grown a lot, so have the tools and libraries which are available.

Another important aspect of doing it alone is the ability to market your software. If you're not interested in that too much and don't have a spouse or friend who can take care of promoting, selling, customer support, etc, then it's difficult to make a living with it.

And of course, the competition is fierce and getting stronger every day. Kids are growing up with computers and devices and they write code. I've just spent 30 minutes playing a 10-year old's game (John Carmak's son, btw :) ).

Then there's always the 'open source' way - you start solo and then people join you.

My life as a solo programmer has been in ups and downs - making money while working full time as a programmer and then going solo and spending all my savings on experimental projects which so far haven't been commercially successful.

Now I have to take a job again and be a 'team player'...

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#44

Post by omouse »

ProAm wrote: post #25
jorblume wrote: post #12

I'm the only developer in my ad agency of about 80 people. It's super cool to write all my own code, make all my own stack choices. To know that I wrote everything here is a really cool feeling. At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. And given my extremely young age (only a few years out of school) sometimes it can be hard to be sure I'm making the most efficient choices. There's a lot of times…

> At the same time, I really miss talking shop with other devs. I'm in the same position, it's really lonely being the only technical resource. Just someone to bounce ideas off of. On the other side, everything works and when it doesn't I know exactly why within moments because I wrote it all.

I hear that, the convos at some dev shops leaves a lot to be desired when you're bombarded with work. Hanging out on IRC with like-minded people who like Lisp/Scheme, more hardcore javascript coding than plain old jQuery and Free Software is far more fun than talking to marketing heh.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#45

Post by jsprogrammer »

DrNuke wrote: post #33

Most grunt work is automated and so much knowledge is leveraged even solo-shops can keep all tech together. Good! That said, data from hard-science problems is the new nut to crack. I almost cry thinking of startups like rescale.com, the chance they offer to independent researchers and scientists to do so much more than it can be done in a shared lab or cluster. When I read of $$$ burn rate in the SV, I cringe: one i…

Is rescale's offering the equivalent of an Ikea table? I'm not sure of the relevance of the connection.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#46

Post by ioeu »

westoncb wrote: post #34
ioeu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your abstract visual debugger is really cool! I was thinking about pursuing something similar for my bachelor thesis but ended up doing something much different. I'm curious to learn more about your insights regarding the subject, where can I find more information? Also curious to learn what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? Edit: Goin…

>... what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? There are a lot of things that have gone into that question. I would say the biggest thing was that I became aware of the fact that I was always 'in my head' instead of having a more direct interaction with people/environment, and realizing (from a number of sources, but importantly, through…

I can relate to what you're describing, thanks for sharing.

Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells me I'll end up depressed.

I've been told more than once I should look into meditation, do you know of a good way to start?

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#47

Post by ioeu »

westoncb wrote: post #32
ioeu wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your abstract visual debugger is really cool! I was thinking about pursuing something similar for my bachelor thesis but ended up doing something much different. I'm curious to learn more about your insights regarding the subject, where can I find more information? Also curious to learn what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? Edit: Goin…

Unfortunately I haven't really written on the ideas behind it, though I probably will soon. A couple people asked me to submit it to the 'Future Programming Workshop,' so I was thinking of putting together some kind of writeup—but I had no money to attend. The main idea was to display a running program's state at the same level of abstraction at which programmers think about their programs. I often found myself writi…

I would've enjoyed reading more about your approach seeing as it seems to be very alike to what I wanted to try and solve. I wanted to, similar to what you describe, be able to visualize the program's data structures as I visualize them in my head avoiding writing one-off, text-based, sub-optimal printing code.

I'm still interested in the idea (i.e. visualizing a program by its state) although I fear it may not be practical for non-trivial programs with complex, large and rapidly changing data structures.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#48

Post by drawkbox »

Most programming languages were started by solo/independent developers, and some worked many years before anyone else helped. When you look for innovation, somewhere along the line it was an individual or solo dev work of creativity. Great teams are made up of self propelling independent/solo capable developers that can work in a team or parallel on separate products or services in a project.

Guido worked on Python for many years before anyone joined in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R52mi-Fyk0E

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#49

Post by westoncb »

ioeu wrote: post #46
westoncb wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>... what made you go from thinking "this was you" to thinking another lifestyle could make you happier, which lifestyle? Why? There are a lot of things that have gone into that question. I would say the biggest thing was that I became aware of the fact that I was always 'in my head' instead of having a more direct interaction with people/environment, and realizing (from a number of sources, but importantly, through…

I can relate to what you're describing, thanks for sharing. Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells me I'll end up depressed. I've been told more than once I should look into meditation, do you know of a good way to start?

> Some part of me wants to just live in solitude with little or no social interaction at all, but I deliberately avoid it since my rational side tells me I'll end up depressed.

Yep! That's the struggle.

This guy has a pretty nice intro, with a quick 10 minute or so practice you can do: https://youtu.be/3Uqoxo_jPXQ?t=3m33s

Then there's this book which works pretty well as an intro because it's a collection of diverse perspectives, from different people, on the subject: http://www.amazon.com/Beginners-Guide-Meditation-Inspiration...

Alan Watts is also generally pretty good—can find talks from him on youtube, and he's written many books.

Re: A Salute to Solo Programmers

#50

Post by westoncb »

ioeu wrote: post #47
westoncb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately I haven't really written on the ideas behind it, though I probably will soon. A couple people asked me to submit it to the 'Future Programming Workshop,' so I was thinking of putting together some kind of writeup—but I had no money to attend. The main idea was to display a running program's state at the same level of abstraction at which programmers think about their programs. I often found myself writi…

I would've enjoyed reading more about your approach seeing as it seems to be very alike to what I wanted to try and solve. I wanted to, similar to what you describe, be able to visualize the program's data structures as I visualize them in my head avoiding writing one-off, text-based, sub-optimal printing code. I'm still interested in the idea (i.e. visualizing a program by its state) although I fear it may not be pr…

It remains to be tested, but I'm pretty confident it will work for this—in a significant proportion of cases. You'd only visualize a few data structures at a time, most likely; there are controls like fast forward/rewind and a progress bar, and stepping one operation at a time; and you can just let it run on the side with the self-navigating camera for an extended period of time, and maybe you catch an anomaly. For applications where you're operating on data structures with millions of elements or whatever, you might need to artificially restrict the amount of data for testing—but that's reasonable to do most of the time. There are also controls you can't see that make hierarchically navigating from groups of data structures to single data structures to single elements, easy.

I think you're one of the few people I've come across who seems to get what it's for at all :D

Post reply on HN