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The best programmers I know

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Re: The best programmers I know

#171

Post by boarush »

jumperabg wrote: post #90
StrLght wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cloudflare claims that Pages allow unlimited traffic [0]. So it seems like author is using Workers, probably on a free plan. [0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/developer-platform/

Why would you run your site on Workers instead of the static content hosting? Aren't the workers supposed to be used in case you must do computational work for requests, connect to a db, do some work etc... ?

Using Workers is now what Cloudflare recommends by default, with "Static Assets" to host all the static content for your website. Pages, as I understand, is already built on the Workers platform, so it's all just simplifying the DX for Cloudflare's platform and giving more options to choose what rendering strategy you use for your website.

Re: The best programmers I know

#172

Post by GiorgioG »

whstl wrote: post #168
jppope wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree - though there are places where I trust an implementation of things like a well known algorithm. However, to add onto this, I'm consistently shocked at how often it is much CHEAPER to "roll your own." We've done some reviews on systems after a few years and the number of bugs and security vulnerabilities we experience with code based around packages is much MUCH higher. Its hard to put a number to…

The low quality of modern libraries is something that REALLY shocks me. The library space has become competitive, and people are running them as business. The goal is not to be correct or even good, but to be a "first mover" and selling tutorials, books, Github sponsorships, Patreon subscriptions... It's bad not only in terms of security, but also in terms of developer experience. I am constantly amazed at how little…

> The low quality of modern libraries is something that REALLY shocks me.

How could you be shocked? Everything that's happened in the software industry outside of medical/DoD has been about delivering features as fast as you can, quality be damned.

Re: The best programmers I know

#173

Post by ctxc »

gwbas1c wrote: post #154

> Read the Reference > Don’t Guess I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference. Why? Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.…

This is why I tend to Google instead of chatgpt everything. I always end up finding these little interesting nuggets in comments/threads in SO

Re: The best programmers I know

#174

Post by theutopian »

bob1029 wrote: post #103

Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business. I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve. I'll thr…

Well said, well written.

Re: The best programmers I know

#175

Post by 1970-01-01 »

strken wrote: post #159
1970-01-01 wrote: post #142

>Don’t Be Afraid To Get Your Hands Dirty..code is just code All the other topics bring great wisdom, but 'go touch the code' is no longer the responsible thing for senior devs. Junior devs working on minor things, sure. However, senior devs should be rigorously following a process to 'getting their hands dirty'. When senior devs are tinkering with business critical or life critical code, they are usually unaware that…

I think you might be misreading "don't be afraid to get your hands dirty" as "go poking at stuff for trivial reasons without following any proper process" instead of "don't offload parts of your job to other people out of fear". I imagine that, if an engineer at Pacemaker Incorporated is given a task that's touching an area they're not comfortable working on, the author would suggest that "sorry, talk to Alice" is no…

It's ambiguous to the point where 'just get to work' can be seen as the action that the effective senior devs do:

They are not afraid to touch it.

They never say “that’s not for me”

Instead, they just start and learn.

Re: The best programmers I know

#176

Post by 9rx »

palmotea wrote: post #160
gwbas1c wrote: post #154

> Read the Reference > Don’t Guess I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference. Why? Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.…

>> Read the Reference >> Don’t Guess > I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference. I think that's fair. I've definitely seen "not best" programmers only guess and only read stackoverflow, over and over, forever, and never read th…

The trouble is that there is a strong correlation between being able to design good interfaces and being able to prepare good documentation. Meaning, where guessing fails, the reference is bound to also fail due to inaccuracies or failing to communicate what you need to know. Which stands to reason as both require concern for how the user perceives the product. That is a skill in its own right.

In practice, so many times I've spun my wheels thinking I just didn't understand the reference only to find out that there was a bug or change that invalidated the reference. Nowadays, if I must interface with a product built buy someone who doesn't understand the user, I'll go straight to the source code if guessing fails or resort to probing the system if code isn't available. Not only is it faster, but you'll gain a better understanding of what is going on than some stumbling attempt to describe it in natural language will ever be able to communicate.

Re: The best programmers I know

#177

Post by nocman »

lapcat wrote: post #161
dockerd wrote: post #111

For those unable to open the link due to owner site being hit by Cloudflare limit, here's a link to web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de...

There's some irony, is there not, in presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers" when you've created a programming blog that completely falls down when it gets significant web traffic?

> presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers"

He was identifying the best programmers he knows (as is obvious from the title). I don't think it is unreasonable at all for even a semi-technical person to be able to do that.

Also, it is highly likely that the author never expected their article to receive a high volume of web traffic, and allocated resources to it with that assumption. That doesn't say a thing about their technical abilities. You could be the best programmer in the world and make an incorrect assumption like that.

Re: The best programmers I know

#178

Post by socksy »

ctxc wrote: post #173
gwbas1c wrote: post #154

> Read the Reference > Don’t Guess I find that, when working with a new "thing," I often like to guess for about an hour or so before I really do a deep dive into the reference. Or, I'll read a stackoverflow answer or two, play around with it, and then go to reference. Why? Often there's a lot of context in the reference that only makes sense once I've had some hands-on time with whatever the reference is describing.…

This is why I tend to Google instead of chatgpt everything. I always end up finding these little interesting nuggets in comments/threads in SO

I think my preferred LLM usage style these days is to try something on my own, and then get the LLM to critique what I did. I think it's both better for learning (just like learning natural languages, it's better for learning to make a mistake and be corrected than it is to look up the right answer each time), and also I think the stakes are lower since you're not relying on the LLM to not hallucinate. You can also learn some new threads to pull on that you can investigate on your own etc

Re: The best programmers I know

#179

Post by ergonaught »

lapcat wrote: post #161
dockerd wrote: post #111

For those unable to open the link due to owner site being hit by Cloudflare limit, here's a link to web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de...

There's some irony, is there not, in presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers" when you've created a programming blog that completely falls down when it gets significant web traffic?

> There's some irony, is there not

There is not.

Re: The best programmers I know

#180

Post by pc86 »

Taek wrote: post #133
bob1029 wrote: post #103

Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business. I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve. I'll thr…

I always get a lot of pushback for avoiding frameworks and libraries, and rolling most things by hand. But, most frameworks and libraries aren't built to be audit-grade robust, don't have enterprise level compatibility promises, can't guarantee that there won't be suprise performance impacts for arbitrary use cases, etc. Sometimes, a third party library (like sql-lite) makes the cut. But frameworks and libraries that…

This is smart if you work for a company that actually needs this level of robustness. The problem is that most don't, and a lot of people who work for these companies wish they were working someone "better"/"more important," so they pretend they actually do need this level of performance.

The guy like you on a mission critical team at a cutting edge company is a godsend and will be a big part of why the project/company succeeds. The guy who wants to build his own ORM for his no-name company's CRUD app is wasting everyone's time.

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