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

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

#91

Post by globular-toast »

When I realised it's not magic.

The first computer I had access to was my family's Windows 95 PC. I learnt to write HTML in notepad and see it rendered in Internet Explorer. This was the beginning of my career, but so much of what was happening was accepted by my brain as simply "magic".

I would later chip away at that stack of magic and learn how more and more things worked, but even while being an accomplished programmer I still had this feeling that magic existed. It wasn't until I learnt to build my own computer from discrete logic components (thanks, Ben Eater) that I finally felt like I understood it. Computers are just machines.

I've since revisited textbooks (like Knuth) and the history of computing (starting with Babbage) and feel like my eyes are no longer obscured by my preconceptions about what a computer is.

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

#93

Post by lazharichir »

1. When I learnt TypeScript after having used mostly PHP and JS until then – not sure how I lived without stronger typing

2. When I started reading programming and software engineering books after having just "done it" – this brought so much thought and structure to what I used to improvise

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

#94

Post by quickthrower2 »

02020202 wrote: post #84

Not AHA moments, but some pointers: - most tech is stupid simple, like retard levels of simple, with incredibly complex description - SOA is stupid and monlith is always the way to go(maybe with handful simple microservices) - microservices are not SOA - event sourcing is almost never a good idea - raw bytes over the wire or in storage are not as complex and mysterious as you might think - compiled languages are not…

With bare metal, are you not just paying more for staffing to maintain it? Bare metal as cheaper sounds suspicious. Bare metal as essential maybe if you are doing something like 3D graphics processing or mining or “big data”.

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

#95

Post by yodsanklai »

There were so many... I learned programming by myself with limited resources when I was a kid. Eventually I got a formal education and there were a lot of aha moments!

For instance:

1. Writing a Scheme interpreter in C

2. Abstract data types and encapsulation

3. Functional programming and recursive algorithms

4. Groking OOP and design patterns (this took me a long time)

5. Understanding how processes and scheduling is done in an OS

More recently, not really a "aha" moment, but Git has been a game changer.

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

#96

Post by quickthrower2 »

jdmoreira wrote: post #10

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 runt…

How did this work - genuinely curious? If you work as a team did everyone else stop being a cowboy too then pay down that tech debt? Or is this solo work or perpetual greenfield work?

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

#97

Post by brainwipe »

1. Seeing a company do agile right by keeping the customer so close their almost in-house. All the other stuff is meaningless. 2. Realising I didn't have to code for faceless corporates shifting cash around, I could work for a small company actively trying to make people's lives better. 3. Breaking neural networks out of a predefined topology and letting them grow. 4. If it changes during runtime, put it in the database. If it changes per environment, put it in config. Every else in code. 5. That programming is a craft and you must treat it like one; just bashing out code to fill a brief isn't enough.

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

#98

Post by scandox »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #86

1. That programmers were a market , we weren't just a bunch of nerds sharing cool stuff with one another. That speaker at the conference? The one talking about Wheezle-snort 7.0? Yeah it sounded awesome, but it was supposed to . It's a sales pitch, even if the software is free (Actually, especially if the software is free) 2. That programming and making stuff people want are two entirely different things, although pr…

> You can spend your entire career in programming, learning all sorts of goodness about things like Erlang innards, and never really understand what your job is.

Sometimes I feel like my job is to protect other programmers from finding out what their job is.

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

#99

Post by quickthrower2 »

haroldegibbons wrote: post #59

My "aha" moment was realizing most of my ideas and most apps out there are complete garbage. Not needed. Damaging, even. 99.9% of all of it. 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…

Very poetic! But true.

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

#100

Post by quickthrower2 »

hirundo wrote: post #37

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.

Aka interactive window for c# devs using VS
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