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Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

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Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#131

Post by ftxbro »

arjvik wrote: post #128
ftxbro wrote: post #101

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 unde…

What sort of Turing complete systems are you thinking of?

It could be a game like terraria or minecraft or factorio, or a game map editor, or a middle school hand calculator, or spreadsheets, or an automatic hotkey or macro app, or anything that is at all flexible or extensible. Of course several of these wrap real programming languages but it's not obvious at first especially if you never did programming. There are so many ways, and it's likely that embryonic hackers will come across something like this and use it to make silly program-like experiments and tinkering before they learn how to program. Or at least that was true earlier. Maybe replacement of computers with phones has changed it, I don't know.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#132

Post by prepend »

Learning to decompile and debug third party libraries was really handy. This was back when a lot less stuff was open source, so debugging threading issues in BEA Weblogic “enterprise” Java was really helpful to learn about packages and libraries and also understand that other people’s code isn’t magic, it’s just some other person like me doing their best.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#133

Post by LudwigNagasena »

mindfulmark wrote: post #8

Realizing 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…

Not all external dependencies are noncompiled. Also, library code is often different from your regular codebase especially in a language like C.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#136

Post by geitir »

mindfulmark wrote: post #8

Realizing 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…

Just calling out that if it weren’t for open source this would be much harder

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#137

Post by franciscop »

Both in programming 10+ years ago and in painting ~2 years ago did the same way; I didn't need "confidence" since for long time initially I was just playing.

Follow a bit some tutorials, then play around with code, try to make something, its ugly AF so keep trying until it's no longer horrible. Rinse and repeat.

How to know when you are "a skilled craftman"? As long as you look back 6~12 months and think "that was ugly! I'd do it differently today" you are learning (good!). Otherwise you have become a skilled craftman (also good!) or are stuck, but at least in my case it was obvious when I was actually stuck and not improving.

Note: this "playful learning" didn't work for me with learning a language (prob need a base good enough to just keep the ball rolling) nor with piano (probably because painting is satisfactory from the first stroke, but piano is only after you can actually play stuff).

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#138

Post by Throw6away »

specproc wrote: post #32

I'm a self-taught one-man show, and just in the process of onboarding a new, more experienced colleague. In some ways it's terrifying, as I know a lot of my work is trash. On the other, recapping everything I've achieved myself, with no CS degree and nothing but Google to guide me has made me feel oddly proud. From doing the recruitment and chatting to my new colleague, I've really gotten an understanding of how smal…

I've recently had two engineers assigned to help me. I feel the same as you - I know a lot of my work is trash (for good reason, but still - not code to be proud of), and it is also true that I forgot just how many varied skills I had to acquire to be able to do the work I do.

> There's always going to be more things to learn, but looking back every once in a while can put things in perspective a bit.

Well said! Thank you for reminding me of this.

Re: Ask HN: What boosted your confidence as a new programmer?

#139

Post by bmitc »

mindfulmark wrote: post #8

Realizing 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…

Imagine any other profession needing to inspect, rebuild, and fix the tools that they are given to do their job.
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