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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?

#141

Post by bmitc »

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. The amount of politics, power jockeying, engineers who hide behind decisions as if they were technical only to be highly personal preferences, how many people reject simplicity and prefer complexity while calling it simple, lack of documentation, etc.

It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, and any attempt to try to make something more simple or documented is fruitless if even accepted. People just can't see to be able to wrap the idea around their heads that one thing doing one thing is simple and not "tedious" or "verbose".

The reason why my confidence lowers is that everyone else is seemingly okay with all of this and continuing along the trend. Meanwhile, I feel like I'm just continuing to participate in building giant balls of mud that just barely work and are just barely understandable. So there's an impedance mismatch, and I face it so much, I just have to wonder if it's me, that I'm not smart enough to push through all the cruft or figure things out or just don't understand how to design. Thus, the low confidence. It's just all very confusing.

I would be somewhat suspicious of anyone in software engineering who purports to having figured it all out or having confidence in the field.

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

#142

Post by astee »

Writing (parts of) an operating system, networking stack, interpreter, and text editor. It dispels all the magic.

Getting over the whole idea of beautiful or perfect code. Realizing that code is a medium of expression and that there is no single right way to do everything. Beginning to think of code as a clay-like medium rather than literary prose that needs to be beautiful like a cathedral.

Seeing how some of the most experienced and productive programmers do things in extremely simple straightforward ways, with no unnecessary cleverness, indirection, abstraction, or anything like that.

Seeing how linus torvalds is right. It's really all about the data structures. Once I understand the data structures and their relationships, I can understand any system. Dispelling the myth that some things are just "too complicated". Almost every problem or system I've ever come across can be reduced to a page of data structures.

Realizing the power of fast feedback loops. How just about any requirement or problem can be expressed as a test case. And that once you have the test case you can fix anything.

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

#143

Post by TheBigSalad »

I panicked before my first job. It was in .NET and I bought a couple of large books about the subject and read them. Then to get on the job and eventually realize a lot of the other people were hacks who didn't understand the technology they were working with.

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

#144

Post by rootw0rm »

bmitc wrote: post #139
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.

that's actually, um...common? i just had to repair an electric jackhammer last week. i worked in a machine shop for a large well drilling company not long ago, and not only did we create/repair tools for the company, but obviously had to keep our mills and lathes and cranes, etc. in good working condition.

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

#145

Post by SQueeeeeL »

bmitc wrote: post #141

If anything, my confidence gets lower as I get more experience. The amount of politics, power jockeying, engineers who hide behind decisions as if they were technical only to be highly personal preferences, how many people reject simplicity and prefer complexity while calling it simple, lack of documentation, etc. It just all makes me feel like I don't belong in the field. It's all so overwhelming and complicated, an…

Writing extremely good quality software is hard and expensive. In the vast majority of cases all you need is okay software developed by people who just want to get the job done. Understanding how software creates value and what kind of software at any moment is valuable; and which parts of your job is tied to that process makes this much clearer.

If anyone reading this just want to write bash scripts that don't violate fundamental principals, there are jobs out there, but they're typically low paying and academic

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

#146

Post by LarryMade2 »

Getting my code to work for the first time (early 2000s.)

Starting out with intranet PHP was a daunting task, had to get the system setup (Apache, PHP, MySQL) write the code then mess with permissions, etc. Getting that first response back that it worked (or at least kinda worked) said to me you can do this!

back when I learned BASIC 20+ years before that, was the same thing, Back then, I started by either entering or loading a simple program and changed stuff and realized I can change this and the silly experiments in changing values and commands gave me more encouragement to learn and try more.

Early success even if stupid, is big positive reinforcement. If you can't get to Hello World because you are stuck in language/IDE configuration, you aren't going to get fer. If you can get there quick and realize the potential you now have - all that low end stuff becomes a desired necessity to make your magic happen.

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

#147

Post by mgerdts »

It was sometime around 1994 and I had working as a UNIX sysadmin / systems programmer for the college of engineering for about a year, while studying computer science. Most of what I was doing involved scary stuff like TCP/IP, other forms of IPC, terminals, permissions, filesystem quota management, etc. I often lacked confidence that I was doing it right.

Then one day I was at the book store and stumbled upon W. Richard Stevens Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment. I spent hours reading it while sitting on the floor right in front of the empty spot on the store’s bookshelf. It taught me that much of why I was doing was right and helped fill in a bunch of gaps. A couple weeks later I was back with half a week’s pay to take it home with me.

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

#148

Post by thealienthing »

The first time I took a rather complex library, learned it inside and out. I read documentation, did examples, wrote my own examples, implemented quick and dirty working versions, refactored, sometimes started again from scratch and eventually clicked with the material. It started slow, but once I really began to understand things, the code started to write itself quicker and quicker until I had stable production code that I’ve been maintaining for several years now. The beginning stages was like solving a big puzzle and built a lot of confidence.

Also in school we had to do some big projects like make a virtual machine from scratch and implement things likes call stacks, threading and memory management with our machine op codes. Doing a big long project that really pushes you out of your comfort zone is a BIG help and also can be an opportunity to do something really fun.

Edit: I left out the important role of asking questions, talking with others and even taking the time to compose a forum post or issue on github when it seems that I’ve truly exhausted all my options. Bottom line is, when I took my time and really tried my best to learn something new/difficult there was always an eventual breakthrough and consequential boost in confidence

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

#149

Post by edulix »

I was 12-13 at the time. When I started programming it seemed really difficult. I didn't have access to the Internet back then.

But I saw it like me against the machine. Since I was youn I wanted to be an inventor. This tool allowed anyone to "invent" any software coming out of the inventor's imagination. It just required a computer, and the inventor not giving up and using his brain. I could do that. I liked the challenge.

Be a tinkerer, have fun! Discover things on your own. Dare to be stupid and do whatever stupid thing feels right. You don't need to follow some pre-programmed plan.

Programming is all about problem solving. You solve one problem, good. Now you will have another problem. No one guarantees you will solve it nor how much effort it will require specifically for you to solve it. And maybe it's the wrong problem to solve. But you will end up figuring all that out, and then you will feel accomplished and willingly hunt the next problem.

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