Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#1

Post by greenleaf3 » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:13 AM UTC

To me the aha moments where as follows:

1. When I was introduced to QBasic

2. When I got to know how simple and amazing Lisp is

3. When I was able to code at the speed of my thoughts with VIM

4. When I got to know Express.js (after learning Django)

5. When I knew that everything in Smalltalk is a message including if else statements

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#2

Post by jacobwilliamroy » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:20 AM UTC

When I learned what a kernel was, and the implications of proprietary closed source kernels, I was instantly radicalized to the cause of gnu and libre software.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#3

Post by Raed667 » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:22 PM UTC

When react/redux finally "clicked" in my head. Coming from an MVC world it was quite a paradigm change.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#4

Post by bilinualcom » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:28 PM UTC

When I actually understood the idea behind functional programming, specially being able to think in the form of recursive functions than loops.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#5

Post by philihp » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:29 PM UTC

My favorite all-time aha moment was coming from a CVS world and learning how to use git. Oh, you just hash the entire lot of the files together and use that as a version for the repo? Aha! The change set should be for all the files together!

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#6

Post by manjana » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:34 PM UTC

Trying to master non-framework CSS and realizing how dead simple styling a website can be when you are using a framework instead of trying to reinvent the wheel all over.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#7

Post by animesh » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

1. When I understood everything that happened in a custom chart with d3 I created, including d3 patterns, animation, svg, everything else just paled in comparison.

2. When I gave into Power BI finally and fixed a report someone else created, it felt so good. I don't think there is anything that compares to it and I only scratched the surface.

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#8

Post by adventured » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

manjana wrote: post #6

Trying to master non-framework CSS and realizing how dead simple styling a website can be when you are using a framework instead of trying to reinvent the wheel all over.

What is your favorite CSS framework/s?

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#9

Post by Raed667 » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 7:47 PM UTC

animesh wrote: post #7

1. When I understood everything that happened in a custom chart with d3 I created, including d3 patterns, animation, svg, everything else just paled in comparison. 2. When I gave into Power BI finally and fixed a report someone else created, it felt so good. I don't think there is anything that compares to it and I only scratched the surface.

this is on my bucket list! I have managed to get by using either simpler libraries such as chart.js or adapting the data of an already-made chart so far.

What would be a good resource that helped you get to that aha moment ?

Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?

#10

Post by jdmoreira » Mon, Sep 07, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

1. When I realized programming was hard

That’s it. For a long time I thought I was good at programming and I kept making the same mistakes over and over. All nighters, leet coding, runtime hacks, etc...

And then one day it struck me. It’s hard and my mind can’t keep up with yesterday’s cowboy coding.

Slowly I started putting defense mechanisms everywhere - good type systems, immutability, compile type instead of runtime, never overwork and sleep the best I can.

Life is much better now and I'll never go back to thinking I'm good at programming.