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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

#341

Post by slightwinder »

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…

These days it might be better to just learn python. It's cleaner and scales better to complex code. And it's ons most system modern systems available out of the box where shells are available too. Shells are still good for simple oneliners, and knoting multiple processes together, but text-processing involves so many different commands, each with their own quirks, that a consistent simple language is IMHO superiour.

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

#342

Post by nickjj »

hi41 wrote: post #243
m463 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You know how you should almost always eat your vegetables?

You should almost always quote your Bash variables too. Here's why: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/here-is-why-you-should-quote-...

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

#343

Post by artimaeis »

afarrell wrote: post #214
new4thaccount wrote: post #185

SQL (even if just SQLite) as databases open up a lot of power. Vim or Emacs for powerful text editing. A low level language. Sometimes Python doesn't cut it, or it is pretty suboptimal. If you're writing a trading bot, is speed of execution not important? Operating System knowledge can be helpful at times. I bought one of the No Starch books "How Linux Works" and it is very helpful. The command line and by that I gue…

I thought this course did a good job at getting SQL to stick in my brain, largely due to the relational algebra section. https://lagunita.stanford.edu/courses/DB/2014/SelfPaced/abou...

Firmly agree -- I'm pretty sure I've said it elsewhere, this was a transformational course for me.

I got my start in product support where a lot of our problems could be solved in SQL. We were encouraged to learn it, but most people were happy with the most basic syntax for DML. I worked through the entirety of Dr. Widom's course and it gave me the fundamental data understanding to be a real value to the teams I've worked for, and I used that opportunity to transition into being a full time developer.

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

#344

Post by agentultra »

ilaksh wrote: post #286
agentultra wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About 3-4 years ago I was working on an open source cloud platform for a company deploying a public cloud. There was a particular error that sometimes happened in our production environment where a rebooted VM would come up but couldn't connect to the network. We tracked it down to a race between two services in the data plane. It turns out the VM controller wouldn't wait for the network controller to unplug a virtua…

I'm sorry but I don't see why the TLA+ modeling was necessary. You said that you noticed the lack of coordination before that. From your description, it seems like the mutex thing was a diversion. Anyway, a mutex would not necessarily be adequate for coordination (and many types of mutexes will not work between processes at all). So to me it seems that you could have gone straight to the lightweight coordination mech…

Sorry for what? It was my first time using such a tool. I found it useful for understanding the system. I've improved my understanding of TLA+ since then and it has been valuable.

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

#345

Post by doboyy »

bdamm wrote: post #54
enkiv2 wrote: post #51

I highly recommend learning PROLOG & understanding how to write your own simple planner system. The hairiest real problems are hairy because they're best suited to a declarative style (and programs written declaratively can be made much more efficient through more clever solvers -- given naive code, a clever solver has a much bigger efficiency boost over a dumb solver than an optimizing compiler does over a non-optim…

I've never used Prolog in the 15 years since I learned it in college. It's an interesting take on programming, for sure, and I appreciated the mind-expanding exercise, but hasn't helped me in my career at all. Totally agree on awk. I use it almost every day for quick little one-liners. Big time saver. Also agree on state machines, because from there it is a short hop to understanding formal grammars and the foundatio…

Learning about automata theory was one of the most mind-expanding experiences I had in college. It was certainly not something I would've stumbled upon without guidance. I believe that describes most of the value I derived from a degree, being nudged in the right directions toward solutions and problems that a lot of smart people have though about for a while.

Understanding how different languages, or inputs more generally, can be transformed into meaningful outputs is pretty satisfying. It's a topic that almost seems to transcend the realm of computer science.

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

#346

Post by jrumbut »

alephu5 wrote: post #250
jrumbut wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm fascinated by NixOS and am following it, just haven't had a lot of time to dive in yet.

It does sound like the right idea. This is hypocritical as someone who doesn't use it but I hope more people use it.

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

#347

Post by wpietri »

JamesBarney wrote: post #305
wpietri wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me second this. And in particular, I strongly encourage every developer to try starting a new project in a test-driven fashion (by which I mean that you advance the code by writing a bit of test and making it pass, and then doing that over and over.) There's a qualitative difference between working in a well-tested code base that's very hard to describe convincingly. A lot of my early development experience was i…

Unit tests can give you false positives (test failed but code is correct) and false negatives (test passed but code failed). And TDD seems to create so many tests that you get huge false positive rates. I recently jumped on a project and I made a couple of fairly small code changes (a couple of hours) which caused 100 tests to fail. I then spent the next two days going through and correcting all 100 tests none of whi…

If you're saying that it's possible to do testing badly, I agree, just like it's possible to write production code badly. Sometimes teams new to unit testing do it ritualistically, without really understanding the purpose. That can lead to all sorts of bad outcomes. E.g., lots of tests that look impressive and even generate good coverage numbers, but don't really test what matters. Or tests that are highly duplicative, such that changing one thing in the code requires changing a lot of things in tests.

I have definitely dealt with code bases like that, and that sucks. But I have also dealt with code bases where the tests were great, and that's an amazing experience.

To do TDD well, I think it's important to release early and often and to reflect on one's experience (e.g., with weekly team retrospectives). That way if people are doing something unhelpful, like writing very duplicative tests, pretty soon they'll become an impediment to progress. The team will learn to write the useful tests, while skipping the ones that might fit some hypothetical pattern. It also helps people learn to design for testability; often, painful tests are a sign of bad design of the production code.

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

#348

Post by geirman »

Learn to use Proxy Servers for Troubleshooting

Whenever your web app, mobile app, etc depends on a network response, Charles Proxy (https://www.charlesproxy.com/) can be super helpful. It sits in between and captures all the HTTP request/responses and allows you to manipulate them. So, you could capture an API response (or request), manipulate it, then let it continue. It also let's you interrogate the requests easily.

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

#349

Post by smoe »

alphaoide wrote: post #271
smoe wrote: post #270

Monitoring From the beginning of my career in web development I worked in companies that had good to great monitoring capabilities in place to log and measure performance, resource usage, availability, errors, etc. in all parts of the system. so I took it as something self-evident that you would add that first thing, before deploying a new project. Only recently as I started mentoring people in other companies did I…

Can you recommend books/tools? Thanks!

This chapter of the Googles SRE book gives you a good overview.

https://landing.google.com/sre/sre-book/chapters/monitoring-...

But I think it is less abut what specific tool to use, but more to just get started with one and learn how to understand your production system behavior and dependencies from metrics and graphs.

An easy way to get going for monitoring an application is using a hosted solution like newrelic.com Their free version should be sufficient for a very long time.

If you want to run it yourself there are opensource solutions like prometheus.io or riemann.io among many others.

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

#350

Post by mwilliamson »

hackerc wrote: post #224
Robin_Message wrote: post #14

Read the curriculum of an undergraduate computer science course and read up on the things you haven't heard of. Some courses will even have lecture notes available. E.g. these four pages are the university of Cambridge masters in computer science: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1a-75.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part1b-75.html https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/1819/part2-75.html https://www…

Does an offline copy of this exist? Do you think it will go down when the term probably ends soon?

I would expect the material stay up: at the moment, everything back to 1998/1999 is still accessible:

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/teaching/material.html

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