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A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

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Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#21

Post by FLT8 »

graypegg wrote: post #4
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

A bit snarky, but I would add - don’t read opinions from a list and take it as gospel. Adapt to the jobs you’re in, and you’ll develop your own opinions, but now with experience to explain why. Opinions are formed by getting repeatedly hit with the consequences of your (and other’s) decisions, and everyone just has to take enough hits till the pattern seeking area of your brain takes over.

Maybe add to that: try to stay long enough in a role to really feel the consequences of your actions. Even better if you're on pager for a while too. I know it's not trendy to stay in a job for long these days, and conventional wisdom is it's not great for your salary either, but one thing it will do is allow you to understand whether decisions you made were actually good or not.

There are roles I've been in where it's only been years later that the true impact of decisions made was actually apparent. I'm glad I hung around long enough to experience that.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#22

Post by bregma »

johnisgood wrote: post #9
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

I have a very severe case of impostor syndrome. :(

Don't worry, you're not a real imposter. You've just inadvertently ended up in a position where you're expected to be one. Just fake it until you actually become a true imposter.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#23

Post by bazoom42 »

> Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace

Very important! But also important to distinguish between kinds of quality. Using a sub-optimal algorithm or bad identifiers or copy-pasted code can always be fixed later. But some problems like a bad database schema is much harder to fix later.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#24

Post by jameshart »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

> You have imposter syndrome because you are an imposter. You are really bad. It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them

What in the medical malpractice?

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#25

Post by bregma »

trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

I just open vi with default settings and am productive right away. I tried VS Code and couldn't get a "hello world" example to run out of the box after a half hour of trying.

Who cares about other editors, vi is good enough.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#26

Post by myaccountonhn »

This is interesting. If I were to complement the list, these are some items I’d add that helped me:

- learn functional programming. Doing that was how I finally “grokked” programming and could solve problems more easily. Before I was ready to give up.

- learn CS history. I studied UX and what I learnt was mostly one side of how to think about computing where you spoon feed users and remove things. There are other ways to conceptualize software and design, which would have left me less disillusioned.

- learn fundamentals: data structures, networking, performance, operating systems, security, unix, math. These are so neglected in the industry, and we’re left with super complex systems we don’t actually understand as a result.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#27

Post by rileymat2 »

ourmandave wrote: post #20
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this. What if future you has reached that level and people on your team are shipping spaghetti?

I feel like this is bad advice, really, you need to be obsessed with quality and growth, but you can't let that stop you from shipping. Try for clean to the best of your ability in the time constraints you have, but accept that it will be dirty.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#28

Post by thfuran »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

>Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be mad at you, and they are right. But do it anyway. Yes, reboot the servers with users on it. Yes commit the spaghetti. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.

I think you're likely to reach that level a lot faster by trying and failing than by not trying at all.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#29

Post by wruza »

Not sure what 15 years means, but if that’s where I started:

(Blasphemies warning)

- Skip low level and go as high as you can. Ditch C, assembly, hardware. Take python, ruby, js. Never touched C++ cause it’s awful? Good.

- All the money is in the hands of a client. If you’re taking it from someone else, best case you’re taking less than a quarter for essentially the same job. Useless leeches everywhere who perceive you as a magic money generator. Go around them once you’re confident.

- Read sicp, htdp, taoup, but don’t take them to heart. Seriously, extensively test any idea you learn against reality, cause ideas may sound excellent out of context.

- Pragmatic is the only way. Don’t listen to industry peasants jumping through imaginary hoops, they are crazy. Religion in programming is worse than religion irl. There’s insane amount of it in programming. Don’t argue, let them be. It’s actually easy to test approaches by yourself and learn your own ways. Most of these are just habits making no difference once learned.

- Doing something together only turns out faster if you’re very good communicators. Good communicators are rare and you are not the one.

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