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Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

kylewritescode.com

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Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#21

Post by aangjie »

skcin7 wrote: post #15

I have found that I ALWAYS try to learn as much as I can to have a fully intimate understand of the tools that I use. However, I have also found that this has more often than not been a huge disservice to myself. For example, yesterday I got fired from my employer on my 90th day for not being productive enough. I can't fault my employer because I understand his perspective. He needs employees that are productive. I s…

Yep... i know. it's kind of an information addiction. I have been there still working through it. but one thing i have found useful is trying to be aware of what am doing moment by moment. Rescuetime.com has been a great help in summing up my activities and gives me pointers to avoid things not to do.

Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#23

Post by rgiar »

I think this is an important indicators of whether you should be an entrepreneur or a software developer. The best developers are fascinated by the processes that animate their work; sometimes they can't dig down all the way given time constraints but I find that they (and I) could happily analyze (and ideally rewrite) the entire gordian knot of a complex system.

Entrepreneurs have a totally different profile. Instead of the "how" and "what" of the project, they focus on the "why" and the "who cares". Will this project be valuable? Should I pivot this idea? Who is my first customer and what do they want?

These tendencies don't coexists very well -- they both want to be priority 1 in my mind. While I've been writing code, polishing scripts, reading kernel code, and accumulating my 5000 lines of emacs-lisp hacks, my friends chose different routes and started small businesses or pursued influence and high salaries. Now I'm a super-wonky developer and they're much better at sniffing out the real value in the world. Each of us has our place and on some days I'd rather be them. Somehow though, and somewhat mysteriously, when it comes time to choose I'd rather be rewriting the low level than pursuing meaning at the high-level.

Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#26

Post by IvoDankolov »

For me, it's kind of the default state of mind, building models of reality, and I can go as far as doing it unconsciously. Just a few hours ago I was in a friend's office talking to him about 3D models and through no conscious decision of mine I started twiddling around with a perforator. The point where I realized what my purpose had been was when I broke the flow of the conversation with the complete non-sequitur, "oh, now I know what that twiddly part on a spring does - you pull it and lock the perforator making it more compact".

I know other people that do that too. For some of us, the immediate reaction to a new thing is "ooh, shiny, how does it work? Let's run some experiments." The scientific mindset is useful, I think, no matter what you wish to exploit.

Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#27

Post by Nitramp »

Even the most trivial of applications today will depend on an incredible amount of carefully crafted, clever to genius code (operating systems, databases, compilers, VMs, ...). I'm always deeply humbled when I think of all the engineering smarts and effort that went into the stack I'm working with every day.

There's no chance in hell to understand all the tools. It's quite possible to understand the concepts and general principles these tools are built around (i.e., all the stuff you get taught in a proper computer science course), which I think is what one should thrive for.

Note that even understanding the concepts will not even nearly equip you to (easily) understand and re-implement these tools, there's a lot more to any properly crafted tool than just the rough concepts.

Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#28

Post by hackinthebochs »

5teev wrote: post #7

You can ask these same questions about a lot of things we use every day. Do you have deep knowledge of how your car works, or just a superficial understanding of the basics to keep it running? How about your refrigerator? Household plumbing? Your computer? And how deep is "superficial"? Another question to ask yourself is, "If it breaks, could you fix it?" And what is fixing it? Swapping parts, fiddling with function…

The difference between appliances and tools we physically use and programming tools is that the abstraction for physical tools is necessarily as simple as possible. Cars being one of the most complex tools we interact with, it still has a very basic and well defined set of abstractions to learn.

Software tools on the other hand have a way of spiraling in complexity. We're so good at using physical tools because this simplicity allows us to learn their use on an unconscious level, ie. muscle memory. The take home here is that we need to radically simplify the programmming tools we use. Unfortunately the trend towards frameworks rather than libraries is moving in the wrong direction.

Re: Do you strive to understand your tools, or simply “make it work”?

#30

Post by mey »

ekidd wrote: post #4

I dig as deep as necessary to make things work cleanly, and generally no deeper. (The exception is innately fascinating topics, like compilers.) I can't stand kludging around aimlessly until things work, but I can't read the source of every library, either. At the moment, I'm trying to build a drop-in blog engine for Rails 3.1, which involves reading a fair amount of source code. But I need to wrap this up today and…

Agreed, I take the same approach. The world is not black/white, hacks/optimal. There is a balancing act to be had, including balancing time spent against future issues from that solution.
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