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25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
51–60 of 213 posts
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#52There are two kind of life - swim in the sea and walk the mountain.
Swim in the sea you enjoy but nothing left behind. We call the people good at this guys with wisdom.
Walk the mountain you left a path. If the steps repeated made a path to ease late comer. But if not continue walk the path will be covered and gone.
When you walk you follow path not known who made it in many cases. Or create your own. We call them people of righteous.
Are you a swimmer or a walker?
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#53I think one of the most important lessons I took from the coding boot camp I went to was the value of the MVP. There, the first step was to deploy an index.html with "hello" before doing anything else, before even npm init. Then, get your framework running with another hello. Then, the barest functionality possible - if we were building a GitHub analysis thing, make the frontend capable of listing repos before building the server that did analysis on those repos (or vis versa).
Through a couple group projects I refined the concept of KISS and feature prioritizing, siloing, and escalation.
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#54Fascinating comparison of comments. If you read the comments to the article, 100% of them are "same with me". If you read the comments in HN, 50% of them are "set your expectations correctly."
I read this and I felt like I needed to talk with the guy. It doesn't matter if you "don't have anything to show" for 15 years of work. It doesn't matter. Where is it written that programmers must have a hand-coded website or a open source project to their name?
I also never buy the "I'm too much of a perfectionist" line. That's not a thing.
You got bored. You didn't have motivation to complete. Sure, happens all the time. "Too much of a perfectionist" is not a thing.
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#55As a relatively new coder, I feel like I took a lot away from this article. There was a lot that they mentioned that made a lot of sense to me and I will try to hold on to.
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#56What every salary-person has to show for it: a life lived; bills paid; food on the table; health; a roof over your head; a body not ravaged and damaged by hard labor; the ability to relax and have some entertainment in the evening; a place to sleep; comfort; relative stability; the ability to make a living using mostly just your brain. Yes, perspective is important, and I’m not saying one should not strive to make mo…
Hannah Arendt draws a useful distinction between "labor" and "work." Labor is effort required to sustain life: catching food, finding water, plowing crops. Because living creatures need these things continually, labor never ends. Food is eaten or decays and new food must be grown.
Work, on the other hand, has a defined start and endpoint. Ideally, it produces something enduring and unique.
In ancient times, labor was looked down on as something that slaves did. The lowest in society did the back-breaking, life-sustaining work anonymously, while rich, propertied elites built empires, wrote philosophy, and invented new technologies.
The world has changed since then, but I think there's something useful in that distinction. Capitalism transmutes nearly all work into labor. Almost every profession feels like it's performed solely to "sustain life" whether it's plowing fields or producing software. It's all just a salary. So I'm not surprised when I hear that people feel they have "nothing to show for it": they usually retain no ownership of the things they create and it all seems like one long endless task.
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
You forgot to mention millions of dollars of value created for other people.
A lumber jack cuts down a tree and sells the wood for $500 to a high end furniture maker. This furniture maker then produces an armoire that he sells to a rich person for $7000. Was that lumber jack exploited because he only made $500 from the wood?
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Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#58What is this obsessions with leaving something behind, or doing something noteworthy? Be selfish. Programming is my selfish pleasure; I love it therefore I do it.
Just remember, we are a tiny, insignificant speck in the history of our own planet, let alone the universe. If you truly believe you can improve people's lives with code, go do that. But don't make it about proving yourself to other people, or creating a lasting legacy. Ask yourself, if everything I made or affected disappeared when I died, would I still be doing this?
Fight Ego.
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#59No offense, but you claim you have been "officially coding for 25 years now". You state you are 36. Were you really, officially doing anything at 11 years of age. What does that mean? I was a solder tech at 13 years old. I NEVER throw that out there in any blog or write up, even though I was _literally_ getting a paycheck from a company. Does that make me an official solder tech? Hell no. When people ask how much exp…
At another point in TFA he says "I've been in the field for over 15 years." The sentence you quoted from comes immediately after a sentence where he states his age. I don't think he was being misleading -- he's been in the field for 15 years, but has been coding for 25. I think the word "officially" might be the source of your objection? Perhaps a fair nit-pick, but in context clearly not malicious. He didn't say "in an official capacity," just "officially."
Re: 25 years of coding, and I'm just beginning
#60What is this obsessions with leaving something behind, or doing something noteworthy? Be selfish. Programming is my selfish pleasure; I love it therefore I do it. Just remember, we are a tiny, insignificant speck in the history of our own planet, let alone the universe. If you truly believe you can improve people's lives with code, go do that. But don't make it about proving yourself to other people, or creating a la…
It's human nature to want to be about more than one's self.