Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#161

Post by koliber » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 10:55 AM UTC

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #131

emmo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of seems to assume that time and money in infinite, though. Buying a recipe book for one recipe seems like a profound waste of resources.

This sort of seems to assume that it is at all possible to gain knowledge and experience without making mistakes. Hiring people who do not perform seems like a profound waste of resources. Doing projects that fail seems like a profound waste of resources. Learning technology that will not be helpful later in your life seems like a profound waste of resources. When was the last time you found a cookbook where a signif…

Your comment embodies one of the core tenets of what makes a great programmer. Great programmers are comfortable navigating ambiguity. They make mistakes but quickly correct course. They know how to test ideas in a way that yields signals faster. They know that they need to make mistakes, and know how to keep the cost of those mistakes low.

It’s like being able to walk into a bookstore full of cookbooks, and by skimming a few pages here and there, walk out with 3 fantastic cookbooks.

In other words, good programmers have the ability to quickly understand the full problem space (including business concerns) and efficiently navigate the solution space.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#162

Post by xtracto » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 12:33 PM UTC

psadauskas wrote: post #107

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #41

There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…

> People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potential target drops off sharply and you would have to increase the price dramatically. I think, even aside from the incentives, its a matter of interest a…

I have a similar feeling. I've got quite a bit of experience and battle scars after 25 years in the field. I've got technical knowledge at different levels: from jr to staff/architect level to CTO.

However, I've never liked writing. First English is not my first language, so I barely managed to write my PhD thesis in that languages, mainly because I had to. But in general I've tried several times to write some extensive piece about something that I am passionate about at the moment, and although in my head the blog post sounds good, once I start writing, I just get lazy and words don't flow.

What has worked for me is mentoring. I am advisor for several startups at different stages. I have weekly 1 hour meetings with their CTOs (sometimes the CEO, depending on the startup). They aske me questions of things they are struggling with, and I give them my POV, ideas and sometimes more questions.

So far that has been very nice. People have appreciated it a lot (I've even been referred as advisor to new founders) and in addition I usually "charge" 0.5-1% equity instead of money, which is a good way to have some stake in projects I like.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#163

Post by xtracto » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 12:43 PM UTC

cobertos wrote: post #40

I'm still partial to LearnXinYMinutes[0]. It's how I learned enough MatLab/Octave in a couple hours to test out of an intro CS course. Usually I just use that site in addition to the official tutorial when a concept really stumps me. Here's their article on Elixir[1] [0]: https://learnxinyminutes.com [1]: https://learnxinyminutes.com/docs/elixir/

The Elixir one looks to me like a language reference. Nothing wrong with it, in fact I used to love "language reference" books in the 90s to learn a new language.

It's way better than the typical painful language tutorial that is teaching you about how a variable is like a box containing a value... for every new language you want to learn.

For the sake of other people knowledge, if you appreciate this format to learn a language from a book, search for "language reference" books. They are usually succinct and to the point.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#164

Post by xtracto » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 12:47 PM UTC

reactordev wrote: post #25

bidandanswer wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it does hallucinate, you can just paste it the latest documentation and the hallucination rate goes to nearly zero.

Or it apologizes profusely, tells you you’re correct, and fails to fix its reasoning or the examples it gives you.

A couple of days ago I was trying to make Chatgpt give me the equivalent s3:// string for an https://... s3 bucket. The stupid thing would just replace http with s3, no matter how much I told it what I wanted (I needed to reformat several links, and search engines were just giving me s3 -> http scripts).

It finally landed on me that I was using gpt3.5 . Once I moved to gpt4 it got it right the first time.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#165

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 12:50 PM UTC

psadauskas wrote: post #107

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #41

There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…

> People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potential target drops off sharply and you would have to increase the price dramatically. I think, even aside from the incentives, its a matter of interest a…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#166

Post by aristofun » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 1:57 PM UTC

There are no decent educational resources for experienced programmers (except books for narrow specific technical topics).

I know that from personal experience as an engineer and an educator.

There are strong economical reasons for that:

1. Experienced engineers can only learn something worthwhile from much more experienced ones

2. Extremely experienced engineers are rare kind on its own

3. Being a good teacher is a standalone set of skills and attitudes

4. It is extremely small set of intersection between being good engineer and a good teacher.

5. Courses from such people would cost a fortune to cover time and effort.

6. Experienced developers while being a paying audience, are at the same time extremely picky and hard to educate (because they already feel smart and know how to do things). Which makes situation even worse.

7. At the same time there are millions of noobs ready to consume almost anything you throw at them.

So imagine you are an engineer capable of teaching something. What would you do?

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#167

Post by rubicks » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 3:02 PM UTC

Here's a heuristic that works for me, for $foobar, any language and/or sufficiently complicated tech:

Within the documentation, find the sections that deal with the following topics:

  * extending $foobar
  * embedding C in $foobar
  * embedding $foobar in C
  * packaging/distributing $foobar
  * porting/cross-building $foobar

In my experience, these topics are inherently hardest to implement, last to be documented, and trickiest to understand. As such, they make for worthwhile reading for advanced practitioners.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#168

Post by marksimi » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 3:53 PM UTC

bityard wrote: post #128

onetimeuse92304 wrote: post #41

There is a general lack of advanced materials in software engineering. This is one area where market economy works against common good, unfortunately. People who have the knowledge and want to capitalise on it are highly incentivised to preparing beginner level materials and maybe a tiny bit to prepare the something for people who already have a bit of knowledge. After that, the number of people who are your potentia…

> And it happens that people will not buy a $200 book even if it had $100k worth knowledge in it. It is not at all unfashionable to pay $50k for a master's degree, however.

OMSCS is ~$9k

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#169

Post by AlchemistCamp » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 3:54 PM UTC

dyarosla wrote: post #154

ilrwbwrkhv wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Casey Muratori and Jonathan Blow are some of the greatest minds countering the whole programming movement which creates sub par software imo.

While I like some of their opinions they do pontificate an awful lot for folks who haven’t delivered what could be considered “above par” source code- the stuff in their streams is pretty darn messy.

Both of them, especially Casey are focused on extreme performance. If you write graphics engines and low-level tools for games, you have constraints that 99.9% of devs don't.

Re: Ask HN: Programming Courses for Experienced Coders?

#170

Post by Zambyte » Sat, Dec 30, 2023, 4:32 PM UTC

fauigerzigerk wrote: post #77

Zambyte wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you also try telling it what it should do instead?

No, because there is nothing I wanted it to do instead. Perhaps what I should have done was to change the system prompt to something like "You are a helpful assistant that will admit its mistakes but never apologise for them."

> because there is nothing I wanted it to do instead.

"Simply do not say anything and move on" is something to do instead.