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

Learning the [1] Unix Philosophy. Writing & Using small tools that can be piped together... was a huge AHA moment for me

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy

Powershell? (I've done windows most of my career, but "shell" would apply anywhere).

It always seemed so lame compared to neat new functional languages or distributed actor frameworks. And, not being much of an ops person, I almost wanted not to be any good at powershell (or any shell) so I wouldn't get ops assignments.

After getting familiar with it though, it's improved my workflows and ultimately quality of life. I'm not only more fluent in ops now, but I also get to spend less time on it, which is what the rationale for not learning it was (write a script once and never have to remember what I did when creating a new environment).

I think the simplest realization is that the compiler is always right. Yes, technically, compilers can have bugs but 99.99% of the time the bug is yours. I used to stare at non-working code and think "This should work!" But that's never true. If it doesn't work, I made a mistake.

My next realization was that a well-defined and clearly communicated product definition is 10x more important than good coding.

Yea I would say the same about nand to tetris for me. I only discovered it after college I wish I had found it sooner

I went from Ruby to JavaScript development. First, I’d like to say I think starting with Ruby/Rails is a bad idea. Ruby uses a lot of higher order functions, but it isn’t super clear from the syntax how that all works. Higher order functions in JS are much more clear, IMO, on account of having to use parens to call the function (in Ruby, you don’t need parens to call function, you can just name the function and delineate the arguments with spaces).

So with Ruby, I was just pattern matching—I never had an intuition of what lambdas were doing until I moved over to JS.

The Feynman Method was another aha moment. Learning how to learn, in my case, by writing down stuff in my own words as if I were teaching someone else was probably the most important thing. That helped me develop a much deeper understanding of important concepts.

Similarly, not trying to learn everything was a big deal. Don’t try to learn all the niche technologies you see in job listings expecting you need to know those things in order to qualify for the position. If you just do dozens of tutorials, you’ll end up knowing a lot of things very superficially. It’s much better to know a handful of ubiquitous, related technologies very well and have a strong foundation of programming fundamentals. Those things can transfer over to other technologies, when you need to pick them up.