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Coding is boring, unless

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Re: Coding is boring, unless

#71

Post by benashford »

to3m wrote: post #9

I hope that's somebody's living quarters in the photo, and not their office! I've worked at a couple of offices that felt tightly packed, but they were nothing by comparison to that ;) As a long-term proposition, I'd say that table is suitable for no more than 3. (Not sure what official guidelines are, but I'd say you'd need around 150cm x 75cm, or 5' x 2'6", per person. That gives you enough room for keyboard-laptop…

It's a London based startup, they all look like that until they get some serious funding - and some don't move beyond it even then. If anything, that's above-average.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#72

Post by jgh »

gotchange wrote: post #12
superplussed wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the first year or so of learning Ruby and Rails, I did end up copying and pasting alot from SO. In fact, I think I had a streak of visiting SO every day for at least a year, and that wasn't idle browsing, that was "Oh shit I'm stuck, better hit up SO". So now when I hear claims like this, I just assume it's coming from someone that is new enough to a specific technology that relying on SO is necessary for them.

I rarely visited SO for answers and I went through the novice phase like everyone else but I didn't pick the path of least resistance every time I'm faced with a technical problem, because I have a held belief that you can't accumulate knowledge and expertise if you don't polish your debugging/troubleshooting skills and make yourself go through the painful process of solving technical problems on your own without the…

This thread is killing me. I have worked on a whole bunch of shit that has little to no documentation (SO included) in my career. I have had to figure out a lot of stuff on my own.

SO is amazing when it has information that I'm looking for. You know why? I don't want to have to figure out literally everything. I want to save my figuring energy for tasks worth applying it to.

So just get the fuckin' job done and do it right and quit pretending you're trying to achieve nirvana.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#73

Post by [deleted] »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #21
lubonay wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.

Most companies don't solve non-trivial problems. For instance, 90% of web development is regurgitating the same CRUD for different customers. Most of the work consists of wiring standard components together in a standard way, and slapping some CSS on top of it. If you're trying to think too much and reinvent too much, you'll waste a lot of time. Source: did too much webdev in my life already, and wasted way too much…

[deleted]

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#74

Post by nommm-nommm »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #21
lubonay wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.

Most companies don't solve non-trivial problems. For instance, 90% of web development is regurgitating the same CRUD for different customers. Most of the work consists of wiring standard components together in a standard way, and slapping some CSS on top of it. If you're trying to think too much and reinvent too much, you'll waste a lot of time. Source: did too much webdev in my life already, and wasted way too much…

I do webdev and I solve real and unique business problems. The web is just a convenient frontend for our users. Our backend has complicated data processing and solves unique problems. I know you said most and not all but just giving a counter example.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#75

Post by varelse »

hunvreus wrote: post #63
binwiederhier wrote: post #37

> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…

Most engineers take years to internalize this concept. Fresh out of school programmers will throw themselves at tough problems, get 80% of it done using the latest popular framework before they want to move on. The problem is, the remaining 20% is often what will drive success or failure. As a CTO/manager/team lead, your objective is to mitigate things; keep things interesting enough while getting things done. This u…

I spun my wheels for the first half of my stint at a tech company by being the sort of full-stack developer who never really specialized in anything. During that time, I frequently noted that the engineers who were promoted to the top were specialists in one or more areas important to that company's goals. My managers always told me I was mistaken about that.

So eventually I specialized in one of those areas and got promoted myself during the 2nd half, so much so that Google poached me (that didn't end well, but that's another story). These days, I work amongst the full-stack crowd who want everything written in Python so they can modify supposedly low-level inner loops with impunity. When repeatedly confronted with a C or GPU procedure that is 50-100x faster than its Python equivalent (dynamic typing in inner loops is a harsh mistress and even numpy can make Python coders do really strange things leaving one with code still 5-10x slower than bespoke C/GPU code), they complain about the difficulty of writing C/GPU code rather than consider the performance they're leaving on the table and the money they're wasting by running performance-sensitive code that way.

But then, I've always considered getting my hands dirty and rooting out bizarro bugs the fun part. The hardest part for me is when to say a project is done because I can always find room for improvement. And I prefer to work with people who have a similar viewpoint. It's not easy to find them.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#76

Post by mannykannot »

binwiederhier wrote: post #37

> You can rewrite it from scratch, using a different language or technology. This way, you learn something new rather than patching legacy code. And if your architecture doesn’t allow this yet, you can take steps to improve it, and learn some devops skills in the process. In a professional environment, we develop software not because it's fun, but because it supports the business and/or because it is the business. Th…

I am bemused simply by the author's idea that rewrites are interesting. It is probably a good sign if a developer is irritated by cruft in existing code, but to feel compelled to redo the whole thing 'properly' strikes me as borderline OCD (full disclosure: it happens to me occasionally, but I quickly get over it.)

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#78

Post by cam- »

icegreentea wrote: post #43
iopq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a wise decision if you care about engineers being engaged and liking their job.

Ha. I mean, every engineer loves a green field project, and everyone wants to do a technically sweet project. But engineers of all people should understand that not every project can be technically sweet, and certainly not every project can be greenfield. Could you imagine if everytime you wanted your HVAC upgraded, your contractor decides to rip out your entire current system and replace it with something new ("this…

Engineers always under estimate the amount of business logic in an existing application. This is one reason my mainframe apps are so hard to replace, they often have 30 years of business logic built into them.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#79

Post by varelse »

lubonay wrote: post #18
sohcahtoa wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are two ways to view what the job most programmers do is. IMO it isn't to write code, it's to solve business problems. Code just happens to be the tool that you use to do that, most of the time. Anyone who tries to solve a problem by staring hard at a blank piece of paper instead of just googling the answer is not making effective use of their time.

You are missing the forest for the trees. Reaching for Google and SO as your first impulse when confronted with a problem will deteriorate your ability to find your own solutions in the long run. Use it or lose it, as they say. And besides, any non-trivial problem can't be solved by copying code from SO alone.

Grabbing quick and easy answers from the Google and SO leaves me more time for the really interesting problems in my experience so far. And it's the really interesting problems that make writing bespoke C/GPU kernels worth the time involved in their creation so double-good, no?

To be fair, sometimes I try to solve problems for an hour or so before going to the Google or SO, and when I find I derived roughly the same approach, I consider it a done-deal that it's probably the right way to solve the problem at hand.

I would love to see a coding interview where the interviewee has access to Google/SO. It's a far more realistic portrayal of their on the job capabilities IMO. It would also force interviewers to come up with more interesting questions.

Re: Coding is boring, unless

#80

Post by dham »

I really want to build a team someday like this. https://medium.com/s-c-a-l-e/github-scaling-on-ruby-with-a-n...

or Shopify.

I think it's possible on a Ruby or Python stack. Yes Ruby was a flavor of the month but now its not. I feel like if I hire a Ruby guy/girl now, they might have done it for a while or at least they don't seem to chase technologies.

If I built a product on Node, or Go I just feel like that person would be gone in a year when the next thing comes out.

I'm sure it happens on the Ruby/Python side but I think probably less.

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