How do I know if I'm good at programming?
danielslater.net
How do I know if I'm good at programming?
1–10 of 153 posts
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#2It's not about being good, it's about doing your best and improving every day. Sometimes it's about doing what others would consider bad. Pretending to be perfect is the opposite of progress and evolution.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#3To know if you're good, compare your solution/methodology/speed to others better (or worse) than you for a certain task.
Also learning from someone better than you will help you get better at least 10x more than practicing yourself.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#4When you solve problems other people are incapable or unwilling to solve you may effectively label yourself as: good.
If the problem is a common one and nobody else is able to solve it people will use your code... even if the code isn't good.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#5You're not good at programming - you should embrace that. I suspect many others here hate the code they wrote 6 months ago. I find that's about the amount of time it takes for my craft to be elevated to a new level that makes the differences obvious.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#6You're good at programming if you work hard at really learning your craft.... learning some things to deep expert level and many things to competence. So many programmers make no determined effort to learn - they are the shit programmers.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#7Depends upon what is programming? I think it's more like painting. Are you good at painting? How can we define it? If you know to hold a brush you are probably a painter. Are the best artists that get paid more? Or is the ones that are at the right place at the right time?
Back to programming, I feel that web development gets more credit, and as a web developer I can say that most of the development is just boilerplate configuration, made complicated by layers upon layers of unwanted but unavoidable complexity. On the other hand system programmers and game developers do more hardcore programming stuff, but may not be as much recognised outside their closed community.
So in other words depending upon the domain, a good programmer might mean a person who can figure out the configuration better and keep things nice and tidy (read 'standard') while at some other domains it might mean hardcore analytical capability and number crunching..
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#8There isn't a good or bad programmer just various levels of skills.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#9If you despise articles like that and hate 95% of HN content, you might be good.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#10If you produce code that works with few or no bugs and is easy for you and your colleagues to maintain and fix, then you're good at programming.
Being a good coder is different from being a rock star coder. In fact, rock star coders can be terrible coders and yet have large followings. Most rock star coders became popular through blogging, tweeting, hacking and/or writing trivial software modules that are widely used. Coders who work on difficult problems don't usually become rock stars.