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Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

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Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#101

Post by superasn »

nostrademons wrote: post #44

Meta-habit: learn to adopt different habits for different situations. With that in mind, some techniques I've found useful for various situations: "Researchey" green-field development for data-science-like problems: 1. If it can be done manually first, do it manually. You'll gain an intuition for how you might approach it. 2. Collect examples. Start with a spreadsheet of data that highlights the data you have availab…

Point #5 about unit tests is so true, wish i knew it before jumping on the bandwagon. I wasted so much time writing tdd code only to learn later that the specs had changed. This can save you an insane amount of pain and time.

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#102

Post by Clubber »

Pro/Con list everything. Don't read something as a best practice and take it as gospel. If best practices were really best practices, there wouldn't always be new best practices. When you pro/con it, you understand why.

It's not that everyone is full of beans, but what works for their environment doesn't necessarily work for yours. The best shoe size is 10 wide. I know, I've been wearing them for over 20 years.

Also test your assumptions. It's super simple to determine if doing it this way is faster/slower better/worse than doing it that way. Write a short script / console app prototype and put timers on it. It's much faster than arguing endlessly with someone over it. Collect some metrics.

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#103

Post by tome »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #33

1. Don't "give up" when trying something new and cut-and-paste and thrash around blindly sticking things places. It takes just as long to learn why things work the way they do as it does to slash and burn -- and you'll pick up something useful along the way 2. Check your ego at the door. A good friend begins a class he teaches having coders say "I'm a programmer and I make mistakes" 3. I've seen a lot of simple syste…

> 3. I've seen a lot of simple systems that did useful things that grew into complex systems. I've never seen a system that started off complex being anything but a huge PITA for everybody involved. Keep It Simple, Stupid

Seems to be Gall's law:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gall_(author)#Gall.27s_la...

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#106

Post by mezod »

Great thread! One of my habits is to try to think of what I learnt the previous day, and if it involves some specific lines of code, briefly go through them to recap. The other is to try to learn something new every day, no matter how little the learning is, I want to feel I did learn something. Consequently, I developed this little app https://everydaycheck.com to track these habits among many others that are not necessarily related to programming.

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#107

Post by markeroon »

zabana wrote: post #50

The most valuable habit I've developed IMO is reinventing the wheel. When you face a new challenge with new concepts you're unfamiliar with, the best way to get a good grasp of the environment/tools/techniques is to rebuild it (them) from scratch. Example: I was spending a lot of time interacting with external REST API's (foursquare, twitter and other services) but never really understood the inner workings, so I jus…

Agree with this completely. Takes a bit longer to get spun up on a topic but it's so worth it.

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#109

Post by newscracker »

Logic and logical thinking - this is the fundamental quality. Thinking, analyzing, contemplating and wondering.

Attention to detail everywhere - be it code or design or documentation.

Communication skills - if one cannot communicate ideas, break them down and simplify them to oneself and others, the work will not really deliver a lot of value over time.

Curiosity to learn more and delve deeper to understand how things work (at a lower level).

Be lazy and optimize - optimize things, avoid repetitive work by building tools and tools that use tools.

"Limited resource" thinking - you may have 16GB RAM, a 4TB drive and a 100Mbps Internet connection, but your users may not. As much as possible, try to minimize things - the size of your program, the amount of data you store, the amount of data you transfer over the network, etc. It might sound silly, but this never goes out of fashion. It just comes back around once every few decades as we invent new devices and ecosystems with different constraints.

Re: Ask HN: What habits make a programmer great?

#110

Post by AlwaysRock »

skytreader wrote: post #58
grub5000 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * Practice empathy Any tips on how to do this? I don't often feel things for myself and it's even rarer to experience empathy at a level I can detect. I meditate to try to better understand and learn to detect my feelings, but haven't made much progress yet (I use Headspace).

Read (good) fiction. Backed by science! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-rea... https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/lite... https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2... https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-athletes-way/201412... I've been confronted with this question a couple of times even before I read the articles linked above and I always answered…

On this note... the books I've found most interesting over the last couple years are ones that expand my mind to a viewpoint or a perspective of another people group that is different than my own.

Two very different books but, Between the World and Me, and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia both made me think in ways I cant quite describe.

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