Don't.
If they insist, point out that all the tech in the world still leaves you with 51% human interaction. And that is the most pleasurable part.
Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
31–40 of 51 posts
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#32Paraphrasing Stephen King's advice: Life isn't a support-system for technology. It's the other way around. If there's no joy in it, it's just no good. And my own thoughts: "Get better at using technology" is a vast possibility space. You'll never be able to learn, use, or even appreciate all modern technology like a specialist. Be intentional and figure out what you want to get out of your technology use, and learn w…
Or just get a specialist to do it.
You just have to convince one that your thing would be more fulfilling than writing their own malbolge compiler or whatever they currently do in their spare time.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#33Turning something off and back on usually fixes any problem, which extends to apps. This means it's actually hard to break stuff, so go ahead and try things. Play with your apps. Follow tutorials. Try to use features you haven't been 'trained' on. You'll find you can do more than you think, and often you'll improve on the processes you've been told to follow.
Corollary: If your coworkers or employer say this is bad advice that's a massive red flag and you need to find a new employer, unless you work in medicine or nuclear power, in which case maybe it's ok.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#34My philosophy towards writing code, building projects, anything.
1. Get it working.
Find a solution, any solution. Something is better than nothing. Once you have a solution, you know the space pretty well.
2. Get it working well.
Iterate and make it better. Refactor and fix bugs. At this point, the general logic should be sound, but there may be missing features, add them.
3. Get it working fast.
Find the slow parts and make it faster.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#35Truth be told I think non-programmers are the experts on using technology. When I have a problem I reach for code, the real power users are the ones who don't have that option.
The interesting thing is they are not building things up from first principles, or making new tools, they're using exactly what they have, as is, and developing a process around it that they can teach and share.
Programmers rarely do that. A programmer sharing something means developing it enough to put in the App Store, or convincing you to run their scary shell script.
A non-programmer takes 3 existing things, uses 10% of the functionality from each one, sometimes using one step to undo unwanted stuff from the last step, and does the task reasonably fast without a single hard to explain step or unusual tool.
And these are real world problems, not just stuff coders made up as an excuse to code more.
It's the opposite of what programmers talk about all day, it's not first principles thinking, their basic building blocks are insanely high level million line apps, and yet it all works.
Maybe we could learn something from them.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#36Depends on their goal and inclination. But perhaps this: Learning the basics of the Unix shell can be very useful when wrangling text and data, or for operating on lots of files in a batch.
I think learning Excel and Regex in VS code or even some random browser based regex replace tool might be more practical.
It's easier to remember when you only need to process text and data a few times a month... and average people will need to do that kind of thing even less.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#37Excel is a functional programming environment which works at scale. Yes, we hate it. Yes, date handling is a mess. If you learn how to drive excel you can do almost anything.
Agree that Excel is a great tool and can lead to more advanced skills, but what would "functional programming environment" mean to a non-programmer?
Yea. That's hard. Probably, I should have just said "it's remarkably advanced programming"
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#38Start thinking about how data moves. This is the simple first-principles trick that lets me understand things. What data is moving where? How is it moving? If you want to get better at using technology, not just understanding it, I can give you a tip as a UI dev. Just ask yourself: "what would an overpaid designer named Ramona assume about the average user of this app". Unfortunately, most things have been enshittifi…
Ramona seems to do a better job that the vast majority of programmers... modern tech tends to be a joy to use unless you're expecting a blank canvas to do things your specific way, which is not what most people want from an app.
Any enshittification I see is strictly in non UI stuff, like vendor lockin and subscription models.
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#39is it a bug or a feature?
Re: Ask HN: What would be the single piece of advice you'd give a non-programmer?
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
What would be the proper resources to learn how to use excel (or Google sheets or other spreadsheet)? I feel the major issue with excel (and other stuff such as CSS) is that one learns by cobbling things together and never through a formal process. This means you end up inventing things that kinda work but you often don't use the tool the way it was intended.
>I feel the major issue with excel (and other stuff such as CSS) is that one learns by cobbling things together and never through a formal process. This is literally all programming, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you keep learning and don't just keep doing the same cobbled together mess for years and years
I disagree, in my experience most people I know who learned ruby, python, java, C or other programming languages went through some book or tutorial.
Many of the people who write CSS or use Excel have never read a book about CSS or Excel.