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Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#21

Post by atonse »

mattbgates wrote: post #9

With every project, I'm always learning something new. I went from building projects with dozens of files to less than 10 and try to keep it to just a single page. I went from spending months on projects to spending no more than a month on a single project, sometimes taking up to just two weeks to complete. I think it's the lessons of sticking to the logic and getting straight to the point with programming. If there…

Strongly agree. I often reach for pen/paper first and doodle a problem, just think about it deeply, poke at the shortcomings, think of scenarios where it might be inflexible, decide where not to over-engineer, etc before starting to write anything.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#23

Post by unobatbayar »

Continuing to learn advanced mathematics and revisiting core computer science concepts like networking, systems and architecture. Mainly from video lectures and O’Reilly books. Haven't tackled machine learning projects yet. It's one of my goals, but I must have a solid foundation first.

Never thought about building things to become a better programmer but to create something exciting or cool. Nowadays, it's mainly personal iOS and Javascript projects.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#25

Post by coreyp_1 »

I build things that I don't know how to build, mostly in C++ (because I like the language and I want to get better at it, especially the newer parts!).

I built a programming language as a library and put the entire process on YouTube.

I just recently built a job queue worker pool library.

Next, I'm going to tackle building a HTTP server as a library, hopefully supporting HTTP/1, 2, and 3.

Just build things that push your limits and enjoy the journey!

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#26

Post by nestorD »

Doing small projects that exercice skills I am interested in one small step at a time.

These days it is a lot of LLM as it is a moving target with a large number of applications (they are the perfect toy to go quickly from "I wonder if I can do that" to a working prototype).

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#28

Post by cgopalan »

I am trying to see if I can work on more interesting problems. Julia Evans has this great quote: "I have one main opinion about programming, which is that deeply understanding the underlying systems you use (the browser, the kernel, the operating system, the network layers, your database, HTTP, whatever you’re running on top of) is essential if you want to do technically innovative work and be able to solve hard problems."

My using snowflake on the job made me more curious about modern analytical databases, so much that I want to get more into the internals. I am on a journey that's making me read more about database internals, take free courses online, and this in turn is leading me to some auxiliary things I need to know for knowing about databases, like cpu architecture (cache handling, branching etc) and further down the rabbit hole. To some extent, it's helping me overcome the feeling of inadequacy due to not having a computer science education even though I have been in the software field for more than a couple of decades. Not that it has harmed me much - I have always felt that you could learn things on the job in software development. But it just feels somewhat right to go back to the basics.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#29

Post by keyle »

I've been doing this for over 20 years. I think my major leaps have been

- Contracting. New workplace approx every 2 years avg, I got to work with some really talented people which I sought to spend my time with as much as possible and learn from them.

- Personal project. I may be contracting on .NET but geeking at home on Python. I may be contracting on PHP but doing SwiftUI at home. I make games, software, tinker on other stuff. Basically widen your scope, explore by doing.

If you want to be in the top 10% of any field, the key is to be willing to go further than 90% of the field. And the beauty of this ever-changing industry, is that you have no idea where that's going to lead you.

Re: Ask HN: What are you working on to become a better programmer?

#30

Post by adamzerner »

Taking Eric Normand's course Beginning Clojure (https://ericnormand.podia.com/beginning-clojure).

As someone with most of their experience in JavaScript and Ruby, I really like how Clojure is just so _different_. It's like someone who speaks English learning Chinese instead of a similar language like Spanish. I think doing that opens your mind and teaches you more than if you learned something that is "more of the same". Similar to how it is useful to learn about other fields instead of continuing to grind away at "more of the same" within your field.

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