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Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

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Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#21

Post by mamcx »

Do you know when some naive people claim that build a "simple CRUD app" is easy, but a OS or a Database engine or a Game engine or Language or Super-Cool-Algo_performace-magnificence or Super-Science-thingy is hard?

All of them are super-wrong.

All of them are long, hard projects. All of them requiere specific skills, that maybe are hard to know because you don't find much info about how do them (for example, I haven't find good enough, simple material in how build a relational engine).

But do it are easy. Because the "science" behind them is more SETTLED. Is just niche.

> YapDatabase, Audiobus, or AudioKit

I don't know them, but it look the same as the things I'm talking about. I LOVED to have the time or funding to devote to this kind of projects and living from them (ie: I want to build a relational language.)

IN CONTRAST

The most "simple" apps, are HARD TO DO.

Them are easy projects, but DO THEM is harder. The specs are unclear, you can't rely in a cool algo that solve most of it, you can't relly in a big, large, solid foundation, you NEED TO BUILD AND PULL from several sources in how do them.

Rocket Science is "solved", but you can waste months trying to finally know what the hell is necessary to build that e-commerce website.

Just look at the madness with JS. Is now easier doing assembler than that.

----

So, I mean that the human factors are the uncertain nature of most software projects are a higher burden that the actual "hard" projects.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#22

Post by LiweiZ »

I'll be 35 next year and started writing code when I was 30. I have very similar experience. This year, I focused on how to write better code instead of designing and building. I'm slowly getting better this year. My biggest code base for one of my prototype was around 25k LOC. I mainly wrote iOS app, too. I spent more than one year to take care of my kids so there was a long gap. And it has been difficult for me to find a job. There are always meaningful ideas and having the ability to bring some of them to life is my biggest motivation.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#23

Post by tastyface »

ared38 wrote: post #15

If you want to become a domain expert, become a domain expert. You won't learn the intricacies of the newest structure from motion algorithms by writing user-facing apps. you have to specialize, possibly for years, until the domain is second nature and the code is just putting your knowledge into text, if you want to singlehandedly write a world-class library. But for heavens sake, why? Do you actually care about how…

I don't care about audio destuttering, but there will come a time when my apps will be made better by a finicky feature that requires similar expertise. Rather than dreading the process (as I do now), I want to learn how to efficiently source this kind of domain knowledge and then implement it without too much of a hassle. Deep, needle-precision learning.

Most programmers don't have books written about their work, but I think most great programmers (of the kind I admire) could write an in-depth book about the unique things that they've written and discovered.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#24

Post by Todd »

First, you're comparing two different domains. App developers (whether mobile, web, or some other environment) live at the top of the stack. As such, they must wrangle many disparate frameworks and libraries to achieve their goals. Framework developers can focus on a narrower set of concerns--albeit sometimes quite deep.

I would suggest that you stop comparing yourself to them and their achievements. Rather, use their example as a starting point in your pursuit of improvement.

Many others offer good advice here, but one of the cornerstones is to look at what others are doing--often and deeply. Many have asked, "How do I become a great writer?" The answer invariably is, you must be a great reader. You need to read A LOT.

The same goes for math. You must solve problems. That's the other half of the coin. You need to do. So pick a problem that hasn't been addressed. Maybe there's something you haven't found a library or framework for. Take the opportunity to build it, package it, and open source it. You'll see that the set of concerns is different from that of an app developer.

Edit: typo

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#25

Post by sean_patel »

> Over the past 3 years, I've released a few apps on iOS.

Wow. That alone puts you in the Top 1 to 5% of your peers. Even many experienced programmers have trouble shipping code. They (we) wait for it to be "Perfect". The code ends up languishing in some repo and never sees the light of the day.

1-man frameworks are the wrong things to look at. Don't compare yourself with them. Of course you'll feel bad and inadequate.

Maybe you need to shore up your self-esteem. I say this because your feelings about your own abilities will show through in job interviews, and when having discussions with your peers, and you will get short changed (salary, promotions etc).

So I would say, just keep at it, and try to improve everyday. And don't compete with others, compete with yourself.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#26

Post by bitwize »

There are no shortcuts to "supercharging" your work. Git gud, bro. Put in the effort. When you see exemplary code, study the principles behind it and seek to emulate it. I'm a better C programmer now than I was, for instance, because I read a lot of BSD source.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#27

Post by mbrock »

krat0sprakhar wrote: post #5

While this doesn't directly answer your question, but I've found edw519 (a fellow HNer's) past comments on this subject highly enlightening. If you're looking for something inspiring / actionable to read, checkout this collection by him http://v25media.s3.amazonaws.com/edw519_mod.html One of my favorite answers - 71. How do you get good at programming? I believe that there are two ways to get good at anything, "push"…

Related to the idea of pull, I've found that learning from mistakes is in some way the only real way to learn. Like I'm trying to learn about furniture making for practical necessity reasons and it's so clear that the only real way to understand is to make something and then see why it doesn't work and then make something better.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#29

Post by rqebmm »

liquidise wrote: post #20

There are 2 things i feel correlate strongly with the best devs i know: 1. Quantity leads to Quality. This has been written about by a number of people and for good reason. As with any craft, quality is born from doing something in repetition and learning from your mistakes. There is a brilliant anecdote on this from a ceramics class of all things ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality... ). S…

I mostly agree, but I'd add an important caveat to (2): Before you go looking for a new job because you're not being challenged, ask to work on other projects at your current job. I've found this is a much better way to learn new languages/stacks/architectures/patterns since you already have a lot of the relevant tribal and contextual knowledge.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#30

Post by altitudinous »

I am in my late 40's, I have been coding since I began uni in 1987, I have a Computer Science degree. When I got out there 25+ years ago I was all about doing things the best way, code reuse, refactor etc to get things just right. Most younger devs are. It took so much time getting the environments perfect, unit tests, etc. The customer paid for that, my managers must have been tearing their hair out watching us faffing about doing crap that ultimately didn't lead to a better experience for the customer. I am much more experienced now and live off my own skills, I have about a dozen apps on the iOS app store the number of users is 7 figures, they bring in good coin. The code behind them is crap, has not been unit tested, there are not massive build environments or anything, I don't write for reuse until I need to reuse, I acceptance test it myself. My users love the apps. They are bug free and reliable, and users often leave reviews to this effect. Experience is everything. I'm old school now, back in the day live fixes to production data were nothing, no-one would ever do that now. I met older gen devs than me, they did not then and do not now even use source control. Yet their releases were and still are 100% stable and bug free. They are still paid a premium for their thoroughness. As I grow older, I see more value in keeping it simple rather than miring down the work in process and the pressure of doing it perfectly. There is little value in it for the customer if the dev is experienced. And I'm happy that these premium jobs are now coming up for me.
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