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Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

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Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#151

Post by [deleted] »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #142
Brian_K_White wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never enjoyed shitty coffee. I never enjoyed shitty chocolate or chocolate flavored things like cakes. Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate. Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entire…

> I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. So have you tried Cuban cigars?

[deleted]

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#153

Post by [deleted] »

billllll wrote: post #106

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage…

[deleted]

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#154

Post by hammock »

SpicyUme wrote: post #71
cedws wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that taste is the ability to reason about one's own preferences. A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song." A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they…

I struggle with the music one. I listen to a lot of different music, used see live music at least once a week, and have some strong opinions. I still struggle to explain music to others or why I enjoy certain artists/songs. It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I stru…

What music do you listen to?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#155

Post by weitendorf »

xKingfisher wrote: post #146
billllll wrote: post #106

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage…

> Coding for others is not art. It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs. Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form. A big part of that is knowing which situation…

Code can be art but not all code should or even could be art. Like there is just zero utility or elegance in formatting your bash script with pretty comments and some elegant data model if it’s just something you run to manually pull metrics from a staging environment or whatever.

I see code more like rocks, nails, planks, tape, shards of broken glass, and a pile of signs that say things like RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER. If you need to do something cool with that stuff you probably do need to create something that looks pretty interesting and elegant in spite of your choice in building materials. But sometimes you just need to take a NO TRESPASSING sign and tape it to a plank that you jam into a pile of rocks. Don’t need to find a hammer if you don’t use nails, only need it up for a day, just one of a hundred things on your plate to do something of bigger scope and impact - just make sure the rocks are big enough to keep the plank standing, leave and forget about it.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#156

Post by weitendorf »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #141
mberning wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having a distinctive style is also going to become increasingly rare in the age of LLMs. I see it with people at work already. They have no style. They learn very little. They get something to work but have no ability to discern whether it is a “good way” of doing it or simply “a way” of doing it. They have little interest in how or why things are built. I get the sense that they have little or no enjoyment or intere…

Distinctive style is actually bad. You want your code to be uniform, readers should not be unable to tell who wrote what. Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.

Obviously there’s a line to draw somewhere so that your code doesn’t end up looking like a YouTube comment section or have half of its API with Spanish names. And if by style you mean that overly “clever” or dense code without detailed comments and formatting for readability ought to made digestible by those who lack context about the why/what of it, or that “dangerous” or unsafe practices like rust’s unsafe/python’s exec/C++ UB ought to be only permitted in exceptional situations, sure.

Everything else is so inconsequential that it truly pains me to see people spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars of their time having to indent, comment, or space things in a certain way just to get CI to pass or merge a PR.

I don’t give a fuck that Jeff wants to use 4-space tabs and I cannot tell you how much I resent spending tens of thousands of dollars of Google’s time pleasing the fucking Go linter or trying to figure out errors like “ERROR: const/var” that I can’t turn off because some master artisan truly finds it meaningful and important to make me declare const blocks before var blocks, and their OCPD and fulltime bikeshedding is more important than whatever actual work I’m trying to do to get them paid.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#157

Post by anonymous908213 »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

I'll offer a counter-anecdote and suggest this advice isn't necessarily ironclad. I've used the same pair of $20 headphones for decades (replacing them with the same model when they die), or else laptop/TV speakers. A couple of years ago I got $200 headphones included with a new phone purchase. The $200 headphones were amazing. I got to listen to all of my favorite music with a new perspective. But I still use the $20 ones on a daily basis because the $200 ones hurt my ears with prolonged usage. The $20 ones are fine. The nice ones didn't diminish my enjoyment of them at all. And every now and then I break out the $200 ones for a treat.

Just don't become a snob. I think people tie their identity to the expensive junk they purchase and develop a sense of ego around it, of being better than the peasants, and that's why they become unable to enjoy the "lesser" experience.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#158

Post by alwa »

sydbarrett74 wrote: post #135
CharlieDigital wrote: post #95

> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the…

Exactly. The best writers all have one thing in common: they’re voracious readers.

“Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders are readers,” said Truman…

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#159

Post by B-Con »

cyberax wrote: post #93
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

On the other hand, a part of becoming an expert in some field should be getting to be _realistic_. Learn not to deceive yourself. I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's pro…

Knives are a great example. Any chance it was this guy?

https://youtu.be/pagPuiuA9cY

I've watched like 3 hours of his videos on sharpening because he's pragmatic, approachable, and scientific, and now I actually understand how to sharpen a knife and why it works.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#160

Post by throwawayffffas »

weitendorf wrote: post #156
throwawayffffas wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distinctive style is actually bad. You want your code to be uniform, readers should not be unable to tell who wrote what. Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.

Obviously there’s a line to draw somewhere so that your code doesn’t end up looking like a YouTube comment section or have half of its API with Spanish names. And if by style you mean that overly “clever” or dense code without detailed comments and formatting for readability ought to made digestible by those who lack context about the why/what of it, or that “dangerous” or unsafe practices like rust’s unsafe/python’s…

> Everything else is so inconsequential that it truly pains me to see people spending hundreds or even thousands of dollars of their time having to indent, comment, or space things in a certain way just to get CI to pass or merge a PR.

I generally agree with that sentiment, but the solution is to use automated formatting and lint fixing.

I as a mostly python developer have my gripe with mypy. The powers that be decided all code must pass mypy which means I have to spend hours of their money typing out trivially inferable types because myph can't infer the type of the empty dictionary I just defined when just two lines below I proceed to initialize it. Or it can't infer the return type of my function that returns true in half the return statements and false in the others.

If I wanted to write down types I would use another language. And if I didn't want duck typing I would write somekind of ML. In short I would never write out the types because that's compiler work. But nooooo All the cool kids use mypy and typescript so we have to as well.

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