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Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

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Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#241

Post by achenatx »

There are so many specialized areas that are useful, like common design patterns, basic data structures, various algorithms, transactions, multithreading, parallel processing, etc.

Too many things to list, but I agree with a poster below that suggested looking at the course offerings for a computer science degree. You might be able to find outlines of the courses to get specific topics.

On a day to day basis, code coverage is something that more people should use when writing unit tests to ensure they have tests that execute all their code.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#242

Post by deathanatos »

quanticle wrote: post #10

I would recommend learning the SOLID [1] design principles. I've found them to be a very helpful guide when designing software components. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SOLID

Particularly the S — the Single Responsibility Principal. So much messy, convoluted code is convoluted because it lacks a singular, clear purpose, and bundles up multiple responsibilities into one section of code, be that a module, class, or whatever is appropriate to your language.

They're all good, and you'll get good insight from them all, but I think that first one is more important and has provided me more value than all the rest. I think Liskov substitutability would be my second pick.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#243

Post by hi41 »

m463 wrote: post #239
nickjj wrote: post #142

Shell scripting for processing text. You can often get so much done with so little code and effort. Also on a semi-related note, I think as a self taught programmer, it's easy to get stuck on things that seem cool but are just procrastination enablers (I know, I've been guilty of it for 20 years). Like, if you're about to start a new project and you want to flesh out what it's about, you really don't need to spend 5…

Also, just get to know your shell. big timesaver: control-r basic but useful all over: for i in *.c; do cp "$i" "$i.bak"; done etc...

What does double quotes dollar do in the command?

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#244

Post by lioeters »

throwaway55554 wrote: post #39

Develop a project that has two local processes that have to communicate, one local database, and one remote service that the two processes have to communicate with. Doesn't matter what the project is. Could just be tossing around a string of data that eventually gets dumped into the db and sent to the server. Research different methods of architecting such a system. Code up a few. By doing this, you will actually fin…

I love it. The best way to learn is by doing, and the suggested project idea is simple enough as a starting point, and complex enough to require deep thinking and exploration in various aspects to figure out a good solution.

Many of the recommendations in other comments could tie into architecting such a study project too: data structures, algorithms, communication among distributed processes..

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#245

Post by jrumbut »

aequitas wrote: post #181
theon144 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Isn't the big problem that you have no idea what it's doing to your system? As opposed to what exactly? Any other alternative, e.g. separate shell scripts, "npm run" scripts in package.json, running a Docker image, hell even cmake or other make-like tools - does stuff you don't know about without reading the files either.

With Docker at least everything is contained in the container. Which makes isolating and resetting environments a breeze. Something I worry about often is contaminating my system's 'state'. Which always leads to broken builds or incomplete build systems because a missing dependency is not spotted on your system because it was installed by some other tool some other time. I tend to write my Makefiles to create as much…

I wish more tools did this, I almost always want a local, self-contained environment for everything. The few times I don't actively want I don't see much pain in having one. A couple minutes setup time, maybe?

I have seriously considered hiring someone to audit and prune all the random little libraries and tools I've installed over the years for that one-off time I had to process a weird file format or wanted to try something from HN.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#246

Post by sammnaser »

jimpudar wrote: post #58

Learning how to use dtrace / bpftrace [0] is very valuable if you ever need to get into serious systems profiling. There are some really cool data structures out there you might not know about. One of my favorite basic ones that I get a lot of use out of is the trie [1] (a.k.a. prefix tree). Very useful for IP calculations. Also look into probabilistic data structures [2], very amazing things can be done with them. […

Bloom Filters are awesome.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#247

Post by Const-me »

deng wrote: post #168
shavenwarthog2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In 2019 Makefiles are a useful tool for automating project-level things. Too often webapps will require you to install X to install Y to run producing artifact Z. Since Make is old and baked and everywhere, specifying "make Z" is a useful project-level development process. It's not tied to a language (e.g. Tox) nor a huge runtime (Docker). Make is small enough in scope to be easy, and large enough to be capable witho…

> The big downside of Make, alas, is Windows compatibility. GNU Make works fine on Windows. The sources come with a vcproj to build it natively, or you get it from ezwinports. At my dayjob, we have a pretty complicated build with GNU Make for cross-compiling our application to Arm and PowerPC, and it works on Windows, even with special Guile scripts to reduce the number of shell calls which are extremely slow on Wind…

Most popular folder on Windows is "My documents", it has a space at least in some Windows versions. Make doesn't support such paths: http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?712

VBScript works better on Windows, IMO. Also works out of the box on all Windows versions since at least 2000 (on Win9x it was shipped with IE).

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#248

Post by quickthrower2 »

aequitas wrote: post #20

Makefiles. I always dismissed them as a C compiler thing. Something that could never be useful for Python programming. But nowadays every project I create has a Makefile to bind together all task involved on that project. From bootstrapping the dev environment, running checks/test, starting a devserver, building releases and container images. Makefiles are just such a nice place to put scripts for these common tasks…

I develop on Windows, and I like make as a lazy default you can just type in and as long as you maintain the make file, it will build the thing.

It is also a nice document of what you can build and how.

I also like it because Netlify supports it, so you can get it to run make to deploy your site when you push a commit, giving you a lot of control about your CI, while keeping it simple.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#249

Post by Const-me »

jimpudar wrote: post #58

Learning how to use dtrace / bpftrace [0] is very valuable if you ever need to get into serious systems profiling. There are some really cool data structures out there you might not know about. One of my favorite basic ones that I get a lot of use out of is the trie [1] (a.k.a. prefix tree). Very useful for IP calculations. Also look into probabilistic data structures [2], very amazing things can be done with them. […

Approximate Windows equivalent of DTrace is sysinternal process monitor, freeware. Very useful sometimes.

Re: Ask HN: What overlooked class of tools should a self-taught programmer look into

#250

Post by alephu5 »

jrumbut wrote: post #245
aequitas wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With Docker at least everything is contained in the container. Which makes isolating and resetting environments a breeze. Something I worry about often is contaminating my system's 'state'. Which always leads to broken builds or incomplete build systems because a missing dependency is not spotted on your system because it was installed by some other tool some other time. I tend to write my Makefiles to create as much…

I wish more tools did this, I almost always want a local, self-contained environment for everything. The few times I don't actively want I don't see much pain in having one. A couple minutes setup time, maybe? I have seriously considered hiring someone to audit and prune all the random little libraries and tools I've installed over the years for that one-off time I had to process a weird file format or wanted to try…

Maybe you'd like NixOS?
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