The best hackers I saw learned some turing complete system when they were children without having been taught the concept of programming. I guess for them "take the first step from being a tinkerer to being a skilled craftman" was when they learned that there is a whole field of study for bending those turing complete systems to your will. Then they spend like one day or week binge reading a programming book and understand all of it, because they solved much weirder and harder systems for fun.
Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
101–110 of 245 posts
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#102When you start, you suck. There’s no magical “moment of insight” that suddenly takes you from basically worthless to “vital for the success of the company”. It’s just practice.
For me, I just worked ridiculous hours to compensate for the suckage, read books, listened to podcasts (when that became a thing), programmed at home, read through the code, looked at the code history (code archeology). Eventually you get good and you know you’re good because you can compare your output to those around you.
The secret to surviving the early stage is to recognise that a career is a marathon, not a sprint, and gain joy from the small incremental improvements you make. Everyone above should have worked with plenty of juniors and are just looking for people who are getting better.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#103Realizing that external dependencies are regular codebases just like the one you're working on. That you can open them up in VSCode, look around and figure out any bugs or issues you're having and even open pull requests to improve them. At that point, you lose the feeling that there are magic things out there that you will never understand and that for the most part everything is just regular old code that regular p…
My favourite language for this is Go. The standard library is totally exposed and easy to jump into, right there for you to learn from and to make sense not only of the library but how to actually write Go in the first place.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#104git reflog
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#105Making something _actually useful_. Creating a to-do app teaches me how to use tools, creating a web scraper that sent me an email when clothing my wife missed the chance to buy was back in stock filled me with confidence.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#106>What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
That you don't have to know everything and if you're dealing with legit people, they'll be totally find with that and even expect it.
Trying to lie and say you know everything or say you're a 9/10 on every other odd skill/language will put you into a terrible place.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#107Shipping to large numbers of users in production, getting the metrics back, investigating alerts / bug reports, finding edge cases in real data, and solving them.
Now I have a handle on the sorts of things that can go wrong / are going wrong in the real world, some earned confidence in my ability to fix them, and general upward trend in my ability to anticipate and prevent them during development. On the other hand I no longer have any trust at all in code that has not been put through real-world usage or where I don't have access to feedback from real-world usage. Reality is much better at generating interesting test cases then we are.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#108I am still a novice programmer, if you call a recent graduate that. I feel stupid all the time. I don't know anything about almost everything, and the little I do know about, I'm sure it's less than what I think it is. I don't know how a GAN works. I haven't the faintest clue about machine learning. Someone asked me 'hey, you have a CS degree, tell me how ChatGPT works.' I couldn't answer that. I never took databases…
Honestly, youre doing great. At the very early point in your career that you are at, it is normal and expected that you dont know much. The important thing is that you just keep learning.
There will always be people that are smarter than you. Perhaps even better at your job than you are (currently) in every way. Dont let it get to you; there's nothing wrong with not being the very best. There's also the old saying that "comparison is the theif of joy" (idk who said it, but it has truth). The hardest part is accepting it's ok not to know something; you can always learn it if it interests you.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#109Mine happened a long time ago and the industry was very different, but there are echoes of it in some of the other comments here. I'd say, build a project and ship it to customers. The feelings of accomplishment and agency from doing that were a tremendous boost to me. Even though I knew my code was iffy at best.
It's fine if you're collaborating with someone else or a team, as long as there are some good-sized chunks in there that you can point to and say "I did that part." Your customer might only be a different team in your company. The point is that you created something that had an impact on other people.
PS I'd also suggest: Take some time and build something small in assembly language. Getting even a bit of a feeling for how the CPU actually interacts with memory and registers and math and branching will give you a completely different perspective on higher-level languages.
Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?
#110For me it was working in a company that had a process.
My first job as a programmer I was tasked with building a replacement for an existing system. I worked by myself, and was just told to ask if I had any questions. I reported progress once a week by giving a percentage complete- for the whole project. That’s it.
The next job I was supposed to be a consultant. But I was so clueless- I didn’t know what I didn’t know. Eventually I was canned.
Finally The got somewhere that had a defined agile process- I started getting work done and was even able to mentor some people. Then I flourished and now I’m pretty comfortable with where I’m at.
If it’s not going right, the position might not be a good fit.