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The best programmers I know

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Re: The best programmers I know

#261

Post by alphazard »

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.…

I think people are going to interpret "Don't Guess" in a way that is totally impractical and not what the best programmers do.

You should have a strong sense of the model that a tool or library presents to you as the consumer. And you should use that model to "guess" about the behavior of the tool. You should choose tools that are coherent, so that your guesses are more accurate than not, and avoid using libraries/tools with many special cases that make it hard to "guess" what they do.

The best programmers do not double check the docs or implementation for every function that they call. They are good at writing tests that check lots of their assumptions at once, and they are good at choosing tools that let them guess reliably, and avoiding tools that cause them to guess incorrectly.

Leverage in programming comes from the things you don't have to understand and the code you don't have to read in order to accomplish a goal.

Re: The best programmers I know

#262

Post by mre »

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?

Author here. The site was down because I'm on Cloudflare's free plan, which gives me 100k requests/day. I couldn't care less if the site was up for HN, honestly, because traffic costs me money and caches work fine. FWIW, the site was on Github Pages before and it handles previous frontpage traffic fine. So I guess if there were any irony in it, it would be about changing a system that worked perfectly well before. My goal was to play with workers a bit and add some server-side features, which, of course, never materialized. I might migrate back to GH because that's where my other blog, corrode.dev, is and I don't need more than that.

Re: The best programmers I know

#263

Post by aftbit »

9rx wrote: post #199
pc86 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/compa…

> The guy who wants to build his own ORM for his no-name company's CRUD app is wasting everyone's time. I once unfortunately joined a project where an off-the-shelf ORM had been selected, but when development was well into the deep edge cases started to reveal serious design flaws in the ORM library. A guy wanting (perhaps not a in a joyful sense, but more not seeing any other choice) to build his own ORM that was mo…

I've developed a deep distrust of ORMs at all. I've found that the majority of simple CRUD projects are better served by just having a DAL with explicitly written (or generated) methods instead.

Re: The best programmers I know

#264

Post by moffkalast »

tsak wrote: post #79

> Really Read the Error Message and Try to Understand What’s Written This is a surprising stumbling block for a lot of developers when they encounter a problem. Most times the solution is hiding in plain sight (albeit at least one level of abstraction lower sometimes) and reading what the error was can help to quickly solve an issue. Anecdotal evidence: We use `asdf` for managing Python, Go and NodeJS versions for ou…

Honestly this one's been made a lot easier with LLMs.

Like just today I got a nebulous-ass error trying to compile some old cpp package, threw that into 4o and in a few seconds I get an in-depth analysis back and a one line correction that turned out to fix the entire thing. Literal hours saved lmao.

Re: The best programmers I know

#265

Post by sitkack »

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…

You ultimately own all of your dependencies, even if you never look at them. Back in the 90s and early 2000s, when starting a new project I'd do a couple things.

1) look for all the problems we were going to need to solve and look for 3rd party libs that solve those problems

2) I would do a set of PoC using just that 3rd party library and see what the dev experience as like. I build it from source, read the code, look at the code hygiene, etc.

3) Everything would get checked in as source into our repo, a "full build" would build the 3rd party libraries, you would get source level debugging into everything. You could make invasive changes into libs as part of development, etc.

Every dependency had to earn its place, you didn't just pull in a bunch of things because you needed one function.

When you need this capability is at the exact wrong time for your build and dev process to be able to take on this work. People are panicking, shits broken, no one knows what is going on. If you have everything lined up, you can still do solid engineering using the scientific method, fix your problem and move on.

Re: The best programmers I know

#266

Post by plandis »

aftbit wrote: post #263
9rx wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The guy who wants to build his own ORM for his no-name company's CRUD app is wasting everyone's time. I once unfortunately joined a project where an off-the-shelf ORM had been selected, but when development was well into the deep edge cases started to reveal serious design flaws in the ORM library. A guy wanting (perhaps not a in a joyful sense, but more not seeing any other choice) to build his own ORM that was mo…

I've developed a deep distrust of ORMs at all. I've found that the majority of simple CRUD projects are better served by just having a DAL with explicitly written (or generated) methods instead.

ORMs have the problem that they are only useful for projects with some complexity but not too much.

It’s overkill for small projects and not expressive enough if you’re doing really complicated stuff. Even if you do have a good use case for an ORM currently as your requirements grow it gets harder to hack stuff on that you need.

Re: The best programmers I know

#267

Post by mre »

StrLght wrote: post #115
jumperabg wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... ?

I got curious about it too, found that author actually did a write-up on that in 2020 [0]. I don't know that much about Workers, but it sounds like it's needed for analytics? [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20250328111057/https://endler.de...

Author here. That's the answer.

Or at least it used to be the answer when I still cared about analytics. Nowadays, friends send me a message when they find my stuff on social media, but I long stopped caring about karma points. This isn't me humblebragging, but just getting older.

The longer answer is that I got curious about Cloudflare workers when they got announced. I wanted to run some Rust on the edge! Turns out I never got around to doing anything useful with it and later was too busy to move the site back to GH pages. Also, Cloudflare workers is free for 100k requests, which gave me some headroom. (Although I lately get closer to that ceiling during good, "non-frontpage" days, because of all the extra bot traffic and my RSS feed...)

But of course, the HN crowd just saw that the site was down and assumed incompetence. ;) I bury this comment here in the hope that only the people who care to hear the real story will find it. You're one of them because you did your own research. This already sets you apart from the rest.

Re: The best programmers I know

#268

Post by wging »

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.…

I don't think your approach is bad, nor is it in conflict with the advice in the article, at least in spirit. You aren't (I think) describing a situation where your untested guesses end up in a released product, or in ill-founded advice to colleagues. (Both of those actually do happen.) Forming and testing hypotheses is valuable, building on unfounded assumptions is a very different thing.

Re: The best programmers I know

#269

Post by palmotea »

9rx wrote: post #217
palmotea wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Like "I don't know anything, so I'm just going to try "stuff" I find online without really understanding. > A reasonable place to start. But fair that you can't stop there if it isn't working. It's not a reasonable place to start. You're basically talking about copy-paste coding. Google search, stack overflow, paste in the first answer. Afterwards, ask the dev if they know what they did and why it works, and they…

> It's not a reasonable place to start. Why not? If it works it works. Not everyone is concerned with receiving the award for best programmer. > they won't be able to answer because they don't know. I do understand that you are thinking of a specific person here, but broadly, you will know how it works more or less because you'll already know how you would implement yourself if you had to. But since someone's else co…

>> It's not a reasonable place to start.

> Why not? If it works it works. Not everyone is concerned with receiving the award for best programmer.

Ok, that clarifies things: programmers who avoid reading the docs to guess, or follow the "Google search, stack overflow, paste in the first answer" cycle are mediocre programmers. If they don't want to be good programmers (which what the article is talking about), they can keep doing what they're doing.

> If you are not capturing "why" in your tests, what are you testing, exactly?

You can't capture why in code. Your tests are a demonstration of the "what."

Re: The best programmers I know

#270

Post by jleyank »

A quick scan didn’t find two rules I try to keep in mind:

- know what you don’t know.

- don’t be an asshole.

If you’re known, and known as somebody you want on the team life will be easier. Sorry if I’m repeating others, but life tends to be a team sport and you should play well.

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