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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?

#51

Post by fornever »

pavlov wrote: post #11

For what it's worth, you're feeling the same combination of awe and doubt that grips almost any creative practitioner at some point. Writers realize that there are other people who can write an extremely well-structured, gripping novel in a matter of months. Artists see their colleagues do live drawing and suddenly understand that something that is painful and difficult for them comes easy for these other people. (I…

I wouldn't say that programming is primarily creative, at least not as an industry activity. Development overall can be creative, but the code itself is to a large extent utilitarian. I don't think the difference, as stated by the poster, is creativity, but workmanship. In that sense programming is more like a craft.

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

#52

Post by seanwilson »

> Over the past 3 years, I've released a few apps on iOS: not bad, nothing that would amaze anyone here. The code is generally messy and horrible, rife with race conditions and barely holding together in parts. (Biggest: 30k LOC.) While I'm proud of my work — especially design-wise — I feel most of my time was spent on battling stupid bugs. I haven't gained any specialist knowledge — just bloggable API experience. There's nothing I could write a book about.

Why do you feel you're doing anything wrong..? If you've released multiple apps (30K LOC is a lot!) you're way ahead of most people who never release anything. Comparing yourself to the most prolific developers is a recipe to make you feel bad about yourself.

Writing 30K LOC with minimal bugs is a massive undertaking by the way. Maybe look into using languages with stronger type systems along with automated tests to help. Also, you could rely on third party libraries to do more of the heavy lifting or just remove/simplify features you don't really need. Either way it just takes a lot of work and time.

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

#53

Post by autotune »

kfrzcode wrote: post #16

Hey tastyface. I feel you. I'm here. I didn't graduate from college, and my knowledge is ad-hoc, learned-by-doing and incomplete. I told myself I wouldn't give up until I was making a living writing code. I'm doing that, and it's been arduous, but I've never been more intellectually fulfilled. It's scary, to think there's a whole new generation of programmers who probably can learn faster and more fully internalize a…

Working 80-100 hour weeks will almost definitely lead to burnout, or any other number of problems that result from not being able to take a break from the work.

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

#54

Post by lostcolony »

So one thing I don't see a lot of responses calling out, that I think is worth calling out, is what you see is how long the -code- took. You don't see how long the design took. You assume it started when the code did, but that may not actually be the case. These other developers may have had this idea in the back of their mind for months, chewing it over, thinking about how they'd approach something, doing research in their spare time, etc, before finally sitting down to code it. Same with feature extensions; they likely had a feature request, or the idea, and thought about it long before they coded it.

So if you're comparing hobby projects, things that you started working on within a day or two of having the idea...well, maybe that's part of it, too.

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

#55

Post by GuiA »

fornever wrote: post #51
pavlov wrote: post #11

For what it's worth, you're feeling the same combination of awe and doubt that grips almost any creative practitioner at some point. Writers realize that there are other people who can write an extremely well-structured, gripping novel in a matter of months. Artists see their colleagues do live drawing and suddenly understand that something that is painful and difficult for them comes easy for these other people. (I…

I wouldn't say that programming is primarily creative, at least not as an industry activity. Development overall can be creative, but the code itself is to a large extent utilitarian. I don't think the difference, as stated by the poster, is creativity, but workmanship. In that sense programming is more like a craft.

The plan drawing and model making in architecture is to a large extent utilitarian; would you say that architecture isn't creative?

Have you seen a sculptor at work? There is nothing inherently creative about the hundreds of hours spent chipping away little bits of rock.

What you describe is true in any art - the macroscopic creative vision is supported by the microscopic repetitive work.

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

#56

Post by lettergram »

trustfundbaby wrote: post #3

You're not missing anything. It starts out that (code is crap) and you just get better the more stuff you write , and even then you never quite feel like you're writing "good code". The biggest thing that accelerated my growth was working with people who were much much better than I was. You'll learn so much faster, and become so much better than you can ever by just plugging away by yourself. Just remain humble and…

Second this, I also suggest trying to drop a project for three to six months then come back to it. You'll start learning to document things and where you went wrong. It's all about a feedback loop

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

#57

Post by psyc »

altitudinous wrote: post #30

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 faff…

I'm about your age, and I agree with everything here. My "process" is thinking through problems thoroughly and being careful. I used to be able to find whole teams full of people who worked like this, and during that time I worked on at least 5 outrageously successful, stable products, with no automated tests and no process other than test it manually and check it in. Eventually, time moved on and (mostly younger) people decided that this was impossible, refactoring without unit tests is impossible, humility demands you admit to sucking at programming just like everybody else, etc, etc. So now I mostly avoid working at companies at all, because I can no longer find teams that don't pour 80% of their energy into processes and methodologies.

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

#59

Post by dllthomas »

gragas wrote: post #58

>the code is generally messy and horrible, rife with race conditions and barely holding together in parts. immediately followed by >I'm proud of my work — especially design-wise ummmmm.... what?

I assume proud of completion, and proud of UI design.
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