Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 76 posts

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#11

Post by notjustanymike »

An important lesson I learned is that meaning and complexity are rarely linked. The most profitable code I wrote for a company took under a week and truthfully any mid-tier web developer could have done it. The code with the largest reach (millions upon millions of people) was an afternoon script. I’ve lately come up with a term for meaningful code: Friday Features. Little things you do on a Friday afternoon that have an outsized impact. Meanwhile a project I worked on for months didn’t move the needle at all.

How did I learn? Started coding in college, about as mundane a start as you’ll hear, but it does kinda prove my point that meaning and work can be very detached from eachother.

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#12

Post by silisili »

Ignoring Commodore/BASIC, which I really just used to load things more than programming, I think my first actual programming was QBASIC in elementary school. My nerdy friend knew some, I watched over his shoulder and tried my own.

By 11 or so, I became fascinated with AOL 'proggies' and picked up Visual Basic. Made a few of those. Ended up writing a keylogger on commission that I believe partly led to a man's murder. Story for another day.

After that I lost interest in programming with typical teen stuff, didn't really even use a computer much until later...I guess 21 or 22. Hired to do menial data entry tasks, and decided to automate my way out of it. Next job, same thing. Decided to read a few Python books instead of just Googling as I go as I did as a kid.

Over the years since, it's mainly just been picking up things as I need them or they interest me. Learned enough C to work on an open source library. Learned Go because Python deployments were annoying(among other things), and so on.

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#13

Post by codingdave »

I learned by playing with Apple Basic when I was a kid, reading the user manual that came with the Apple ][. I was drawn to it because it was fun... but I then put it away for my teenage years because other things were more fun. I actually got productive with code when I started work after college. I had an IT job, and learned from the top-down, writing scripts to help the work, writing low-code apps, and going deeper and more complex with each new project. It was a couple years later when my job officially changed to being a full-time developer.

I've now been doing it for a couple more decades... and I'm still learning. Learning to code is not something to learn and then do. It is something you learn continually for your entire career.

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#14

Post by zach_garwood »

I've made a couple small apps for myself, but aside from those, I'm struggling to think of any meaningful software I've written. The software I write tends to facilitate making someone (but not me) rich, but I'm not sure if that really counts as "meaningful."

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#15

Post by mysterydip »

When I was little, I lamented that everything had already been invented, I was born too late to really have an impact. Truth is, there are people with problems all around that you might be able to solve. The solution could be a simple script, a standalone app, an online service, an embedded system, or something else. I've done all of those at one point or another in my career. Sometimes it would save someone an hour of work a week. Other times it allowed a capability previously unavailable and completely changed the way people were able to work.

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#16

Post by Aromasin »

notjustanymike wrote: post #11

An important lesson I learned is that meaning and complexity are rarely linked. The most profitable code I wrote for a company took under a week and truthfully any mid-tier web developer could have done it. The code with the largest reach (millions upon millions of people) was an afternoon script. I’ve lately come up with a term for meaningful code: Friday Features. Little things you do on a Friday afternoon that hav…

I can vouch for this. Major project that took months of my time and effort? Seemingly little impact; sometimes I question where it was just management trying to keep me busy. Minor feature added to a tool as a side project? Seems like every damn person in the company, and all of our customers, use it on a daily basis. Funny how these things work out.

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#17

Post by sokoloff »

Taught myself BASIC from the TRS-80 manuals, the “BASIC Computer Games” books, typing in code from magazines, then took some formal computing coursework in college.

The above was the start/spark, but actually learning to write commercially useful code came from, well, working writing commercially useful code at a series of startups and small companies.

The specific area that I work/worked in isn’t that important to the question IMO. It’s had a wide range spanning from gaming to hedge fund to computer languages to business services. (Gaming paid the worst but taught me the most per year.)

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#18

Post by closewith »

silisili wrote: post #12

Ignoring Commodore/BASIC, which I really just used to load things more than programming, I think my first actual programming was QBASIC in elementary school. My nerdy friend knew some, I watched over his shoulder and tried my own. By 11 or so, I became fascinated with AOL 'proggies' and picked up Visual Basic. Made a few of those. Ended up writing a keylogger on commission that I believe partly led to a man's murder.…

> Story for another day.

Story for today, please?

Re: Ask HN: HN people who write meaningful software, how did you learn to program?

#20

Post by obsidian743 »

I mean, I've written lots of software that's "meaningful" according to your definition, but is still not impactful beyond a limited scope. For instance, I've written code that helps borrowers manage their student loan accounts from a major loan servicer (about ~8 million users). I've written ERP software, help desk ticket management, proposal management software, HR compensation analysis, IoT security, banking account management, and all kinds of other things.

I started learning how computers work back in the 80s/90s because we were poor and I had to hack my computers to work with the games I wanted to play. So I'm running Doom on a POS 386 and have to hack/tweak everything from DOS to the modem init string when playing over TCP/IP. I had started to learn batch scripting and some QBASIC around that time as well. I learned QBASIC because I wanted to create my own "snake" game and eventually my own RPG.

When I was around 10, I went to "bring your kid to work" day for a friend of my dad. He was a programmer who wrote C/C++. He gave me a copy of Borland Visual C++ and a book. I started learning what I could but it was silly console stuff. Eventually the web came out with HTML and Javascript v1 and I started creating my own web pages for myself and for random businesses like my local church and some friends. By the time I was 16 I got a kick-ass job programming and doing IT stuff for the American Military University, coding in Visual Basic, Visual C++, Java, and other random stuff. Skipped college because I got an offer from a major defense contractor making great money for a 18 year old. Now I'm on track to be CTO within a division at a major company (I'm 40 years old).

Post reply on HN