51–60 of 189 posts
When I learned about the repl. For me 90% of debugging is about figuring out how to break at the crucial line and then shining the repl light on it. 75% of writing new code is about trying stuff in the repl and then stepping through the code in the repl and testing everything. For me that quick feedback loop makes coding as fun as gaming.
2. Learning XForms, which can do most of what JavaScript is used for in a tiny amount of code.
3. Learning JetBrains IDEA, the only IDE that I ever enjoyed using.
4. Learning red-green-refactor TDD. Now refactoring is something I do as a matter of routine, not dread.
5. Understanding the fractal complexity of Bash. It's weird how a language can make stream processing and parallelization basically trivial, while making things looping over non-trivial sets of files reliably PhD-level tasks.
6. Doing pair programming, and then keep doing it for four years because it was brilliant.
7. Installing Arch Linux, the first distro where things weren't constantly broken because of version drift.
Not sure I can pinpoint it to a specific time or anything, but as of recent nothing feels like "magic anymore". Many years ago there were all sorts of classes of software, patterns, etc. that looked and sounded arcane and complex and I'd never understand how it worked. Now nothing really feels like that. I can typically get an "aha" moment by doing a bit of reading and understand from a very high level how something…
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For example, most "cutting edge" web apps are better off as PHP monoliths. Facebook was a PHP file for a long time. But most apps in general should never make it past being shell scripts, which are better off staying as spreadsheets or better - text files which are better off as pieces of paper whenever possible. And all paper is better off left as thoughts whenever possible, and most thoughts should be forsaken.
When 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.