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The best programmers I know

endler.dev

51–60 of 320 posts

Re: The best programmers I know

#51
Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point:

"Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written."

It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answering questions on Stack Overflow rather than asking questions. That helped a lot as it felt like a "Real-World challenge" to solve someone else's problem. So it totally depends on how you use Stack Overflow.

With LLMs, I don't use it for "vibe coding" as the kids do these days. This is, IMHO, a wrong way to use LLMs. LLMs are great for integrations into software you are building where it has to analyze realtime events and produce summaries, or even for automating mundane things. But it definitely is not a replacement for a programmer. At least not in its current incarnation. The way to use LLMs is to ask it to provide a birds-eye/10,000 ft view on a topic you want to understand/explore. Why? Because sometimes, you don't even know how something works because you have no idea what it is called (technical terminology/jargon). That's where LLMs help. Once you know the terms/jargon, you can then refer to official documentation/papers rather than relying on the LLM. This IMHO is an underrated superpower of LLMs.

Re: The best programmers I know

#52
I want to add another one, ability to handle emotions (mentioned but mostly in terms of patience) and ability to stay focused.

Two programmers that start with similar levels at the thing that OP listed, but one able to stay focused and productive and the other jumping on YouTube, HN half the day (yes, that's me in many periods) etc are gonna have different impact and progression with time.

Re: The best programmers I know

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? I think talking to people in business domain is the most important thing you can do in SWE or IT in general. The business is the entire reason you write every line of code, the more you understand, the better you will be at your job. I do find drilling down into lower layers of your soft…

> The business is the entire reason you write every line of code It's actually not the entire reason i write or have written every line of code. It may be surprising to some people on this website for entrepreneurs but there are in fact people who enjoy writing code for the sake of it.

Ikigai applies to writing code as well.

Re: The best programmers I know

#55
post #8

This is great advice. Unfortunately, all these AI tools make it far too easy for beginners to not follow it. I'm not sure if all this advice will become irrelevant or if those programmers trained in the 2020ies will not become those "best"..

I'm kinda conflicted that you shouldn't use AI.

With a good combination of Cursor, NotebookLM, flashcards (I use RemNote) and practicing you can accelerate a lot your learning.

Nothing stops you from reading specs, docs and having AI assist you doing so.

Re: The best programmers I know

#56

Maybe this article could be improved by adding “Domain/Business knowledge” and understanding what the business and product actually do. It doesn’t matter if you are a good developer if you are not able to provide solutions because you lack domain knowledge. Depending on the domain it can take quite some time to be a reference

I don't know, I would say that's a quality of engineers, not programmers.

Those can be two different things in the same way a sous chef might be much more proficient at cooking/preparing several dishes but not have the skills to create a menu and run a successful cuisine in a successful restaurant/hotel.

Re: The best programmers I know

#57
welp. looks like we hit the ratelimits:

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Re: The best programmers I know

#59
post #33

> Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written This was a problem _before_ LLMs were so widely used, but they have compounded it 100 fold. In the end, I think it always comes back to RTFM. But that's the hard path and users have been conditioned to think of the Internet as a tool that allows them to jump to the en…

specific tools aside, there's an underlying ethos of giving a man a fish vs teaching a man to fish. if you ask a question and get it answered, you've solved your problem for the day, but tomorrow you'll have to bug that person again. which then makes that person a bottleneck. inefficient.

Re: The best programmers I know

#60
post #6

Reading documentation - if you are junior take time to go one level deeper to understand / fix issues you have. Then read also stuff adjacent to that. By trying to read some documentation like a book from cover to cover will be waste of time.

Absolutely. LLMs offer you compressed documentation at your fingertips. Instead of scrolling through man pages and function references to find that specific flag or parameter you are interested in for the problem at hand, you can directly formulate such a question to the LLM, and it will give you a pretty good result.

Another issue LLMs help with is identifying the correct keywords or terms to look up. Especially with manpages, I've had numerous times where I roughly know what I'm looking for, but in the presence of hundred-plus flags and options, I can't even grep to the right place because I don't know the exact term I need. So I sometimes use LLMs as glorified grep with semantic synonym support.
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