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Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

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Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#241

Post by Buttons840 »

a_t48 wrote: post #177
mablopoule wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper. It was code that was well-architected, had well-conci…

Well-architected + well designed means you can go back later and fix the code if the project survives. I'm hitting this personally right now - the amount of code I can write is dwarfed by the amount of features needed to get something like a working demo out the door - I can spend time and make every thing perfect, or I can squint and imagine how I will implement fixes later and focus on making sure that I don't have…

Ask yourself: Will the amount of work it takes to "do this right" increase over time? (And by how much?)

I drew some quick placeholder art for a game I'm working on for fun. One day I might sit down and draw some good art, but not today. When the day finally comes to finish the art, the difficulty of creating that art will be no greater than it is now. In fact, with improving art tools, it may be easier to do later.

On the other hand, if I'm not quite happy with my database scheme and I want to change it, I can spend a day on it now, or I can spend--based on my experience--months on it in the future. In fact, there's a good chance if I don't fix the database schema now, it will never be done.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#242

Post by skepticATX »

hu3 wrote: post #83

Learning that some folks can produce so much value with crappy code. I've seen entire teams burn so much money by overcomplicating projects. Bikesheding about how to implement DDD, Hexagonal Architecture, design patterns, complex queues that would maybe one day be required if the company scaled 1000x, unnecessary eventual consistency that required so much machinery and man hours to keep data integrity under control.…

I’d argue that by definition, code producing value is good code. It may not be the best, but it has to be at least good.

Almost everything else about code is subjective, but value is objective.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#243

Post by Buttons840 »

randomdata wrote: post #196
mablopoule wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper. It was code that was well-architected, had well-conci…

> since it had no unit test But aren't unit tests the half-assed solution? They are a wonderful help if you want to deliver something fast , but if you had more time you'd probably do something else.

It doesn't get said enough that unit-tests are not the ultimate in good code. There's a lot of shitty code with unit-tests, and there's a lot of really good code with no tests.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#244

Post by makk »

adolph wrote: post #197
mablopoule wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't remember where I saw this quote, but... "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". EDIT: Totally agree about the 'important mindest for startup', I had a similar eye-opening experience, working in a startup with 'cowboy' code that was actually quite good, but I had to unlearn a bit of stuff I read as a junior/mid-level developper. It was code that was well-architected, had well-conci…

> "It's okay to half-ass something, when all you need is half an ass". Going to mule that over.

Sometimes, in the interest of efficiency, you only use half your horsepower.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#245

Post by emmelaich »

RedNifre wrote: post #103
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Before that moment I would manually unwind the cord just like I would wind it up. As you should. Otherwise the cable gets twisted a few dozen times every time the vacuum cleaner is used.

You are rolling up your cables the wrong way if you run into that problem. Here's the right way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PeLrxXUbq0g

Nice. This is a technique you learn in Scouting for rolling up ropes too.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#246

Post by jpeggtulsa »

malkosta wrote: post #115

When I was working in a queue feature (for example to buy tailor swift ticket), and was proud of my complicated real-time solution using websockets and CRDTs...then a more experienced guy came, rearchitected in a much simpler way using just the DB with long-polling, not real real-time (but who cares), and it ended up simpler to deal with network splits or crashes. Learned the hard way you can never rely on the networ…

One of the earliest projects I took over from a higher level developer was an auction website back around 1998. The site worked like eBay in as far as you could put a maximum bid, and it would automatically bid higher than the last bid up to that point. The problem was, it was all dependent on users being on that page so that the auto-reload http header would fire again and refresh the page. If nobody was on the site watching the auction, no automatic bids would happen and nobody would be declared the winner.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#247

Post by james_chu »

This reminds me of my experience in developing "Felo Search", which was truly crazy. In the past year, I hardly dared to think about projects related to general search engines. Such experiences are common, just like when you achieve success in the field of technology, people will also encounter unfamiliar things or situations in life and learn new knowledge and skills from them.

This kind of experience can be seen as a part of growth, no matter how experienced we are in a certain field, we will always encounter new challenges that require learning, I wish you good luck!

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#248

Post by a-dub »

my ego is pretty detached from the reasoning and learning side of the house. for the ego i start with first principles, where i put myself pretty squarely in the blithering idiot column.

when it comes to reasoning and learning, when i'm wrong it tends to be kind of a weirdly joyful moment, maybe to be able to think of the growth from when i was young and less excited to make mistakes.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#249

Post by emmelaich »

lubujackson wrote: post #6

I was in my 20s before I realized even numbered houses are always on one side of the street and odd numbers on the other. Literally no excuse for not figuring that out.

There's an additional rule used in Australia at least. Mostly.

The rule is that moving away from the post office, the left and right are predictably odd or even.

The other popular rule is that say the north side of an east-west st is odd etc.

Neither of these are followed carefully these days.

Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?

#250

Post by emmelaich »

Saving money for a govt department that produced books used in navigation.

I offered to do it in Postscript to save a lot of money in typesetting costs.

Result looked fantastic; off to the printers it went.

Few weeks later, a customer noticed that an entry in August was incorrect. The entire run had to be pulped and re-run using the usual printers services.

Good thing someone checked; the wrong information could have had dire consequences.

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