After going through Ben Eater's 8bit computer video course on YouTube. He builds a computer on breadboards. It is amazing.
Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
21–30 of 189 posts
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#221. lisp
2. realising that its more about delivering than dreaming up the perfect abstraction (get it done).
3. what you think the user wants vs what the user thinks they want vs what the user actually wants vs what the user actually needs.
4. that there are always tradeoffs
5. building a product by yourself (whether on the side or starting up) will give you invaluable experience.
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#23Becoming proficient with tools that allow me to pry into running processes and see what they are doing under the lid
e.g.
lsof to see files and ports opened up by a process
strace to look at what system calls to the Kernel by program is making (and ltrace for library calls)
pstree to see subprocesses spawned
gdb to inject myself into infinite loops of programs written in c-based implementations (e.g. Ruby)
I'm a collector of aha-ish moments so if you want more, my YouTube account is linked to in my profile.
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#24A few that come to mind:
- Implementing small languages, and how it inevitably leads one to a deeper understanding of all the layers that make computing and programming possible
- The Make-a-Lisp project and the language-agnostic conceptual design at the heart of it - https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md
- Declarative nature of React (the view as function of state); using centralized unidirectional state management and actions
- Test-driven (and, similarly, type-driven) development
- TypeScript - Benefits and costs of type definitions, dynamic/gradual and structural typing; power of a language integrated with the editor environment
- Virtual machines, QEMU, and later Docker - Commoditized, reproducible builds for applications and their environments
- Build pipeline scripts
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#25Writing a computer graphics engine during university taught me a couple:
1. I can use math, intuitively, even if I don't know how the exact calculation works.
2. I can use a debugger and replay it again and again to understand what's happening.
3. I can diagram a high level design and not have the complete context in mind and still produce a 10K LoC OpenGL powered computer graphics engine.
After that project, programming never felt impossible to me anymore. After that project, I always had some confidence of being able to learn whatever I needed, as long as I have enough time.
Here is the engine (2013): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PH6-dLvZEiA&t=1s&ab_channel=...
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#26When I watched a world class software engineer build a real time data processing platform using only functional programming. At a major company, over ten teams were automated in a year. Beautiful and useful abstractions around data and data processing tasks that provided extreme value. I could never replicate it, but it reminded me about the power of software and the extreme ability that some have to weird it.
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Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#27When I was introduced to Arc, it was the missing piece that completed LISP for me
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#28My discovery of Clojure followed by my discovery of Ruby's Lisp roots.
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#291. 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 ?
This was when d3 was v3.5. I did a lot of experimentation but also simultaneously read multiple blog posts for the smallest things.
On top of my head I can remember these:
1. https://github.com/d3/d3/wiki
2. Jerome Cukier blog posts
3. dashing d3 js
Re: Ask HN: As a developer what are your aha moments?
#30When I stopped coding, and started thinking. Turns out hacked together stuff is slower to produce than thinking overnight and getting it right.