141–150 of 150 posts
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And "writing" is still a good skill to have, even if you are not a professional essayist or author.
Yes. But writing a letter to friend (or automating your accounting in Excel) differs from writing "War and Peace" (or writing an OS kernel). I think everybody is capable of learning to do the former, but have a really hard time beliving the same for the latter.
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That is the hardest part. Certain professions give a kind of boost. If you switch from being a lawyer or some type of engineering background managers will assume you are smart. Much harder if you move from being a waiter or actor where the assumption may go the other way.
I’ve known a lot of people that had a hard time breaking into tech, even very “smart” highly educated people. The key is persistence. If someone tells you that you can’t code because you were a waiter or an actor, they weren’t someone you wanted to work for anyway.
Your second point is also true. But when getting your first job is the hardest part many people would rather do 3 months to a year under someone they wouldnt want to work for and then move to a better role than continue being a waiter or actor for the rest of their career while they hold out for a first job that is ideal.
I agree that persistence is the key but it is easier for some backgrounds than others.
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A real usable product consists of many things you need to do for it to be deliverable and usable. Hobby projects often don't take much account into production usage, somethings we called it "best practices". In short, imagine your code is in real world usage, which has real user, instead of just "small examples" or project to learn only. It's about mindset here that settle us to be really serious at what we're coding…
> In short, imagine your code is in real world usage, which has real user, instead of just "small examples" or project to learn only. So, for instance, something like starting from an idea (a "webforum for all my friends", or other usable example), designing the database, implementing authentication, implementing the frontend (html, css, js, etc.), then adding those small things and finally deploying to a webserver?…
The point is, not trying to add too much at a time. Try adding one feature at a time, but make it production ready, stable, reliable. It's what make progress !
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> ...never be able to code a production application... It's true, the vast majority of people will never code a "production application". BUT, many folks code everyday in the form of excel macros, R, Mathematica, Matlab or Julia notebooks. Many people create programs and scripts in all kinds of tools to get stuff done. IT'S ALL STILL PROGRAMMING, it's just not what folks here would consider a traditional "production…
> There's nothing special about software development. There's also "nothing special" about writing. Somehow, though, we don't see millions of Hemingways pop up each year. Writing code is a form of art. There is a science behind it, but the same is true for many other art forms. It's true that everybody can be an artist. Not everybody can be a good artist, though. It's equally true for writers, painters, and coders.
The parent comment was suggesting that very few people can code-- and by "code" they meant "production applications".
I am trying to say that lot's of people can code, well enough to solve their domain problems, well enough to put food on their tables, well enough to not need "real programmers" in increasing numbers of scenarios. Just because they're not doing internet scale application development or cutting edge mission critical projects doesn't mean they "can't code".
There's a long and continuous spectrum between Hemingway-like programmers to bored-out-of-their-skulls enterprise developers to lunch-time dilettantes who are running a far more of their business than they should on brittle excel pivot tables and VBA macros.
Not a big fan of these survivorship bias blog posts. I've been fiddling with code since I was about 11 years old (ActionScript for Club Penguin cheat tools as well as some Visual Basic). I got pretty serious in High School and learned Java as well Python. I am now pretty comfortable in the web stack as well as C, but still do not have the confidence to become a developer. I don't get how people can spend roughly 3 mo…
You've identified your core problem, your obstacle to leveling up, and yet show no interest in solving it. What's up with that?
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If your mother ever told you how to do something which required you to make decisions along the way, she’s a coder.
According to that reasoning, babies are coders too.
What changes once babies grow into toddlers is that they develop the capacity to learn new behaviours, not just through the trial and error of stimulus/response, but through instructions given by language. That's where mothers and fathers excel. The quality of their instructions can be measured by the agility and resilience of the behaviour these instructions impart.
Done well, parenting is not just coding - it's software engineering.
One thing I've noticed as a self-taught programmer is that concepts get really, really fancy names for simple things and it kinda acts as a barrier. That said one of the hardest part s of programming on a team so far has been making names that make sense, so, some sympathy there.
I see you've likely met Dependency Injection, the fancy name for "pass the dependency as a parameter"
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I support this kind of encouragement. Please, if you've built something that you or someone else has used, you're a programmer/developer. This field is so broad that I also feel like I don't know what I'm doing with 10+ years of experience. You will never learn/know everything and that's OK.
OK, so if I wrote a UI that a call center used to more easily allow staff to access different customer categories, and I also wrote a text analysis script to analyze and categorize customer feedback, I'm officially a programmer/developer?
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According to that reasoning, babies are coders too.
Babies' demands certainly do compel parents to figure out what to do so they can get enough peace to grab time back for themselves. What changes once babies grow into toddlers is that they develop the capacity to learn new behaviours, not just through the trial and error of stimulus/response, but through instructions given by language. That's where mothers and fathers excel. The quality of their instructions can be m…
Guess they were wrong when they said people from dying industries should learn some programming: we were coders all along!