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Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

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Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#151

Post by crankybear1337 »

firefoxd wrote: post #114

* Five co-founders are too many. * If you are working on someone else's crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea. * Call people you might need later when you don't need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them. * Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You'll make money, lose money, then understand money. * Build as many projects as time allows. It's nice to have the option to…

> If you are bored, create something.

This is a bit rambly and tangential, but one thing I'd really want to emphasize is the "something" part.

Sometimes it's good to decompress by just making something that's neither conventionally useful nor well-engineered, but absurd, like an inside joke taken to the extreme.

A personal example: My friends and I have built an IRC bot that stores most of its code in Redis and is almost entirely developed on IRC by stuffing a bunch of incomprehensible JavaScript on a single line. It can pull data over HTTP and mangle it in various ways, it had a neural network trained with our IRC logs to generate random text, it has a Twitter client, can be used as a REPL, has a simple wiki-like database, etc. All these features are composable using an ad-hoc scripting "language" with a parser that sometimes breaks in hilarious ways. And most of the development happens when we are bored and just want to take a break.

None of the code we've written for it or the technical "design" is pretty or robust. But we have a ton of fun hacking on it because we get to build something while completely disregarding whether it'll be useful or even work properly. That's why we work on it.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#152

Post by yakshaving_jgt »

6ue7nNMEEbHcM wrote: post #139
yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #127

- Many well known people in tech are charlatans. - There is no integrity in keeping silent when witnessing wrongdoing, even when speaking out may harm your current business prospects. - Most "interesting" ideas in tech currently simply aren't. - "Software Craftsmanship" is a scam. - Programmers are far less logical than they would themselves believe. - Non-tech project managers in tech teams are beyond useless; they'…

Hey, can you elaborate on '"Software Craftsmanship" is a scam.'?

Much of what's said in that community is uninteresting and nonsensical. I was super interested in this "movement" for some years and joined many of those events. The trouble is, so much of it is programmers patting themselves on the back for being more "disciplined" than your average working programmer.

Before Google, business listing websites competed by being the most disciplined in listing business data — they had humans doing this. Along comes Google and gains a huge advantage by leveraging technology — not human discipline. And we all know who won.

Most outspoken Software Craftsmanship proponents eschew technologies like a strong type system à la Haskell in favour of manually-written tests — somehow not realising that you gain most leverage by taking advantage of types, and tests, and other formal verification systems.

Furthermore, in my experience, many architectural patterns talked about at these events (onions, ports and adapters, etc) are over-engineered piles of garbage in practice.

Wanting to be a better programmer is a good thing, of course. Dogmatically doing TDD (and yes, I write tests!) and adhering to SOLID principles is not the way you go about it.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#153

Post by icc97 »

baby wrote: post #144
icc97 wrote: post #134

After 8 years I've finally come to the end of struggling with working remotely. I'm going back to 2 hour daily commutes. The flexibility of remote work can be a real problem. It causes arguments because you don't have a 3rd party to blame for when you have to be in work or not.

Not sure I understand. Why do you need to blame a third party?

Same thing as using a GPS rather than a map. If you get lost or something goes wrong it's the fault of the GPS rather than the person reading the map.

The company you're working for fixes the working hours so there's no discussion about doing 'just this one thing' at some random point in the day.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#154

Post by gargravarr »

theyinwhy wrote: post #125
xchaotic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't give up on tomatoes! You say that they do need maintenance, but you plant them, water them, give them sun - I bet you can automate a lot these steps - watering and nutrition, for example. You can give them extra boost with some artificial light and heat. You can do it!

I am not sure the goal was to swap gardening with engineering gardening automation ;)

For every problem, there is an engineering solution.

The inverse is not necessarily true :)

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#155

Post by nsb1 »

* The larger a company is, the more internally screwed up and annoying it is to work for

* Cliche, but worth repeating: Money doesn't buy happiness, it buys choices, some of which may make you happier than others.

* Intimate relationships are like spinning plates: Hard to get started, easy to maintain once they are, but they DO require maintenance or they will eventually crash. Do nice things for your significant other and you will always have a refuge from the other crap that happens in your life.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#156

Post by rntrg »

firefoxd wrote: post #114

* Five co-founders are too many. * If you are working on someone else's crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea. * Call people you might need later when you don't need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them. * Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You'll make money, lose money, then understand money. * Build as many projects as time allows. It's nice to have the option to…

> Don't ask people what they think about your idea. They'll either be supportive or mean to you. None of these are about your idea.

While I agree that some people will be blindly supportive or mean (or will lie as another comment pointed out), it sounds to me that you might be asking the wrong people or you might be allowing ego to taint your perception of their responses.

In my experience, there are plenty of thoughtful, analytical people out there who can help you explore aspects of your idea you might not have considered. Those people, however, will likely only give you their honest assessment if you already have a relationship with them. For me, having a small network of thoughtful individuals that I trust (friends, family, etc) is essential.

In addition, you have to be able to separate your ego from the idea so that you can view criticism of it in an objective way, rather than as simply “mean” (which it might be, but might also contain grains of truth).

This is, of course, no substitute for feedback from actual customers/users, though I would argue that, in the early stages of exploring an idea, it is equally necessary.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#157

Post by tonyedgecombe »

* That I probably shouldn't ride my bike so aggressively now I'm in my mid fifties.

* That the NHS is much better than it's portrayed in the media.

* That my political opinions are way out of alignment with the majority.

* That I don't much like my software, the platform it runs on or a substantial proportion of my customers.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#158

Post by Cthulhu_ »

crankybear1337 wrote: post #151
firefoxd wrote: post #114

* Five co-founders are too many. * If you are working on someone else's crappy idea, think about working on your own crappy idea. * Call people you might need later when you don't need them. Or they tend to disappear when you do need them. * Learn about the stock market and invest right away. You'll make money, lose money, then understand money. * Build as many projects as time allows. It's nice to have the option to…

> If you are bored, create something. This is a bit rambly and tangential, but one thing I'd really want to emphasize is the "something" part. Sometimes it's good to decompress by just making something that's neither conventionally useful nor well-engineered, but absurd, like an inside joke taken to the extreme. A personal example: My friends and I have built an IRC bot that stores most of its code in Redis and is al…

I should do this (build something), but I often get caught up in either perfectionism or being overwhelmed by the scope (as in, it'll never get finished if I build it to something I'm happy with). Should probably work on smaller, manageable things. A LEGO construction is doable within a couple hours.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#159

Post by Cthulhu_ »

alchemism wrote: post #145

* When the CEO dumps the CTO and folds the job into his own, the startup is dead, no matter for how long it continues to turn a profit. * Freecamping in Europe has shown me as an American that America is not nearly as free as we were taught to think. Great place to make money, though. * There are definitely better things to experience in life than playing with more money than one really _needs_.

> Great place to make money, though.

Caveats: Getting sick / injured, not having a normally paying job, poor worker rights, growing old.

I'm happy to pay half my income in taxes if it means me and the people I care about will be taken care of.

Re: Ask HN: What has the past 12 months taught you?

#160

Post by pleasecalllater »

robertk wrote: post #116
pleasecalllater wrote: post #98

Life is short, so work on things that matter. People you love can be gone tomorrow. You too - so prepare for that. You don't make friends at job, you will be fired as soon as they notice you have some family problems influencing your work. There will be no talking, no asking anything... and then your "friends" will silently agree with everything the manager does. Read more - it really helps with anything you will do.…

Hey man! I hope you know we are there for you, and some of us haven’t been in your shoes but strongly sympathize. Reach out to rkrzyzanowski at gmail if you ever need a chat. Sounds like things were very rough but you’re in a much better spot than last year. If I’m right, happy to hear. :) otherwise please reach out!

thanks
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