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How I Became a Better Programmer

jlongster.com

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Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#21

Post by pacaro »

markwaldron wrote: post #16

Those that are complaining about this article: Care to share the experiences that made you a better programmer? Can you link to blog posts yourself or others made that we may find useful?

I like this question!

I think that working in constrained environments early in my career gave me lasting instincts both for efficiency and maintainability/sustainability. I wrote a lot of code on Win16, GeoOS, Epoc32, and a variety of embedded systems. Debugging tools aren't good, the dev-test-repeat cycle can be arbitrarily long, so you learn to avoid a certain sloppiness.

I've been having fun with PICO-8 on a Pocket CHIP, it has some similar constraints, the keyboard is awful and the screen is small, so there are similar incentives, and the added bonus that making a cute game is fairly accessible.

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#22

Post by pacaro »

pacaro wrote: post #21
markwaldron wrote: post #16

Those that are complaining about this article: Care to share the experiences that made you a better programmer? Can you link to blog posts yourself or others made that we may find useful?

I like this question! I think that working in constrained environments early in my career gave me lasting instincts both for efficiency and maintainability/sustainability. I wrote a lot of code on Win16, GeoOS, Epoc32, and a variety of embedded systems. Debugging tools aren't good, the dev-test-repeat cycle can be arbitrarily long, so you learn to avoid a certain sloppiness. I've been having fun with PICO-8 on a Pock…

Also, pre-internet I learned from books. I lived in a provincial town, so I would go to London, buy a book and then devour it, but if I didn't understand something, I had to either keep plugging away until I did understand it, or wait possibly weeks til my next opportunity to find another explanation. Keeping looking at blogs until you find an explanation that makes sense is an amazing resource for getting shit done, but doesn't encourage deep understanding when you really need to internalize something

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#24

Post by [deleted] »

pacaro wrote: post #21
markwaldron wrote: post #16

Those that are complaining about this article: Care to share the experiences that made you a better programmer? Can you link to blog posts yourself or others made that we may find useful?

I like this question! I think that working in constrained environments early in my career gave me lasting instincts both for efficiency and maintainability/sustainability. I wrote a lot of code on Win16, GeoOS, Epoc32, and a variety of embedded systems. Debugging tools aren't good, the dev-test-repeat cycle can be arbitrarily long, so you learn to avoid a certain sloppiness. I've been having fun with PICO-8 on a Pock…

[deleted]

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#25

Post by sriku »

couchand wrote: post #11

There's a lot of value here, but I have to raise concerns about a few things. First, the title: written in the past tense makes it seem like he believes the journey is complete. The article itself doesn't convey that message, fortunately. But I think it's worth noting that a critical skill for a professional is constant education - don't be satisfied that you're already "better", get better every day. I also strongly…

The note about DRY didn't sound like a mandate to ignore it entirely and "duplicate freely". As you said, duplication is a way to ratify that a common pattern exists first before putting something in place that captures the pattern. Many young programmers try to anticipate these concepts and end up with some form of over-design. The goal of DRY is not so much to avoid duplication, but to figure out useful concepts in ground-up work.

"Beta abstraction" is a useful mechanism for this. Wrote a post capturing some discussions in my org. [1]

[1]: http://sriku.org/blog/2016/02/06/beta-abstraction-for-bottom...

edit: I wrote "as you said", but I expanded on what you said instead.

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#26

Post by couchand »

pacaro wrote: post #19
damon_c wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a good place, somewhere in the middle.

Always, but with regards to writing clean code, it pays to just learn how to do this upfront. An analogy is of cooking. I used to be a very messy cook, the food is just as good, but when I was done the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it. Cleaning becomes intimidating at that point. Learning to be cleaner in my processes didn't change the end result for the food, but made the rest of the evening much more pleasant.…

I love your use of the cooking metaphor here. Are you expanding on Uncle Bob's discussion of it in The Clean Coder or was that just a coincidence? If I remember correctly, he uses it there to describe the difference between delivering quickly once (and making a mess in the kitchen) and reliably producing over the long term (by taking a little extra time to clean as you go). Adding the spin about the learning process really (forgive me) sweetens it.

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#27

Post by couchand »

richdougherty wrote: post #15
couchand wrote: post #11

There's a lot of value here, but I have to raise concerns about a few things. First, the title: written in the past tense makes it seem like he believes the journey is complete. The article itself doesn't convey that message, fortunately. But I think it's worth noting that a critical skill for a professional is constant education - don't be satisfied that you're already "better", get better every day. I also strongly…

Responding to your last two paragraphs... James's suggestions about ignoring code form, DRY, etc resonate with me because I'm someone who is usually inclined to spend too much time on those things. I consciously try to reduce the effort I put into those things and instead focus on trying to get the code to actually do something!

Thanks for providing your perspective here, I'd guess that he has a similar mentality, which is why he wrote that.

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, devs who tend to overemphasize formatting and DRY are already self-aware about it, whereas those who give it far too little care and attention regularly shoot themselves in the foot by overlooking simple mistakes that get camouflaged in poor formatting and excessive repetition. My concern is mostly that the latter group would see this article as evidence that they can safely ignore code review comments and such.

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#28

Post by jaequery »

all of these suggestions are tbh ok. but id like to say one of the things that helped me most to get better was when i wrote my own framework. doing so helps you understand not just to code, but how to architect for many many different scenarios.

this allows you to write simpler and cleaner code, which is a high quality code.

and lots of coders think clean code means isolating code into many different pieces but that is so far from the truth. clean codes to me are generally less lines of code, files, and places to look for your stuff. its elegant and efficient. should put effort to separate less and group more. i cringe everytime some dev breaks up a simple methid into dozen pieces when there arent much justification to begin with.

so pls try write your own framework as an exercise. even in a crowded seas of framework, coming up with your own will be the best learning excercise you can do imho. it doesnt even have to be framework but something along the lines that will lead you to think outside the box.

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#29

Post by couchand »

markwaldron wrote: post #16

Those that are complaining about this article: Care to share the experiences that made you a better programmer? Can you link to blog posts yourself or others made that we may find useful?

Reading every article I could find on Ward's Wiki [0]. Apologies about the current format, though some things have improved, I much prefered the simple old interface.

[0]: http://wiki.c2.com/

Re: How I Became a Better Programmer

#30

Post by couchand »

Permagate wrote: post #14
couchand wrote: post #11

There's a lot of value here, but I have to raise concerns about a few things. First, the title: written in the past tense makes it seem like he believes the journey is complete. The article itself doesn't convey that message, fortunately. But I think it's worth noting that a critical skill for a professional is constant education - don't be satisfied that you're already "better", get better every day. I also strongly…

> I also strongly disagree with the suggestion that you should ignore the form of your code. Code is read many, many times more than it is written, so improvements to your own and your teammates' understanding can pay huge dividends. While he explicitly said to ignore fluffs, he followed it up with `Another way to say this is "use your time wisely"`. So I interpreted it as to just not spend too much time on fluffs, r…

Simply using the term "fluff" to describe the form of code shows a lack of respect that I find deeply troubling. Those that pay little attention to code style, form, names of things, etc. (including those who rely on the tooling to fix it for them) tend to miss other, arguably more critical, things. Sometimes, but not always, this happens because those errors are lost in a soup of poor formatting and copy-paste repetition.
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