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The best programmers I know

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Re: The best programmers I know

#61

Post by zero_shift »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #22

Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded s…

Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility.

This is manifest in management methodologies: developers are largely interchangeable cells in a spreadsheet. I'm not saying this is a good thing.

The reasons for this are complex, but generally, business people want us to solve the technical problems they can't handle themselves, they don't want us to "relieve" them of product management, customer relationships, and industry knowledge. Why would they? It would devalue them.

Re: The best programmers I know

#62

Post by lacn »

kshri24 wrote: post #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 answerin…

Love this, I have the same view. I use them for search in cases where I have to circumlocute and can't quite say what I mean (I found an old book I could only remember very vague broad strokes about this way when no search engine could do it) and for "framework" questions, e.g. what is this about and how do the pieces relate, which I would go so far to say is another type of search problem (it's search where I'm starting from zero). I still have to take it with a grain of salt but to your point it's enough to familiarize me with "landmarks" in the information space and then to start building more solid understanding from that foundation.

Re: The best programmers I know

#63

Post by dakiol »

blackbrokkoli wrote: post #22

Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded s…

You can be the “best” programmer at home/internet, and just another employee at work.

Re: The best programmers I know

#64

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

esperent wrote: post #39
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #22

Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded s…

> Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". We can look at a software developer as a craftsperson, and appreciate their skill and their craft, and we can look at them as a business asset, and those are two different things. Both of which have their merits, but this article is clearly focused on the craftsperson side and that's enough. We don't need to make…

I’m retired, these days, and spend the majority of every day, writing software.

I treat it as a craft, and do it for personal fulfillment and learning. I enjoy learning, and solving problems. I also enjoy creating stuff that I find aesthetically pleasing.

For example, I write iOS apps, and I’m working on a new version of a timer app that I’ve had in the App Store, for over a decade. I had added a Watch app to it, and had gotten to the point where it was ready for the App Store, but I kept having sync issues. It wasn’t a “showstopper,” but it was aesthetically not pleasing.

I determined that it was an issue that could be addressed by improving the fundamental design of the app, which had basically been constant for many years.

So I'm rewriting it completely.

That’s not something that makes “commercial” sense, but it’s what I want to do. I’ll also take the opportunity to redesign the basic UI.

I enjoy having that kind of freedom.

I also like to write about my work. I know that very few people are interested in reading it, but I do it, because it helps me to learn (the best way to learn, is to teach), and it helps me to focus my thoughts.

Re: The best programmers I know

#65

Post by ZeroTalent »

kshri24 wrote: post #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 answerin…

This is why I love LLMS. I drop 200, 100+ page 13F filing reports into Gemini, and after 10 minutes, it finds anomalies for me. This was impossible before, as these reports are not standardized at all.

Re: The best programmers I know

#67

Post by dilawar »

> "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's a bit like math books. I dreaded reading formal math during my engineering -- always read accessible text. Got a little better in my master's and could read demse chapters which got to the point quickly. At least now I can appreciate why people write terse references, even Tutte books.

Some references are a pleasure to use. For rust crates, I always go to docs.rs and search there. It's just fantastic. i can search for a function that returns a particular type or accept a particular type etc. hoogle from Haskell was lovely too when I took a functional programming course in college. Cpp reference is also pretty good -- thanks for adding examples.

Today I was reading boto3 python library docs, and I immediately missed docs.rs!

Re: The best programmers I know

#68

Post by koolba »

ZeroTalent wrote: post #65
kshri24 wrote: post #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 answerin…

This is why I love LLMS. I drop 200, 100+ page 13F filing reports into Gemini, and after 10 minutes, it finds anomalies for me. This was impossible before, as these reports are not standardized at all.

Don’t they have some convoluted XML schema? Or are you sending the rendered text of the html versions of the reports?

Re: The best programmers I know

#69

Post by rrr_oh_man »

zero_shift wrote: post #61
blackbrokkoli wrote: post #22

Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded s…

Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility. This is manifest in management methodologies: developers are largely interchangeable cells in a spreadsheet. I'm not saying this is a good thing. The reasons for this are complex, but generally, business people want us to solve the technical problems they can't handle themselves,…

> Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility.

Chicken/egg imho.

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