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I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

jamesdrandall.com

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Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#221

Post by hnthrowaway0315 »

I have given the topic some thoughts. I concluded that the ONLY way for ordinary people (non-genius, IQ Such education is COMPLETELY different from the one they offered in school, but closer to those offered in premium schools (MIT/Berkeley). Basically, I'd call it "Software engineering archaeology". Students are supposed to take on ancient software, compile them, and figure out how to add new features.

For example, for the OS kernel branch:

- Course 0: MIT xv6 lab, then figure out which subsystem you are interested in (fs? scheduler? drivers?)

- Course 0.5: System programming for modern Linux and NT, mostly to get familiar with user space development and syscalls

- Course 1: Build Linux 0.95, run all of your toolchains in a docker container. Move it to 64-bit. Say you are interested in fs -- figure out the VFS code and write a couple of fs for it. Linux 0.95 only has Minix fs so there are a lot of simpler options to choose from.

- Course 2: Maybe build a modern Linux, like 5.9, and then do the same thing. This time the student is supposed to implement a much more sophiscated fs, maybe something from the SunOS or WinNT that was not there.

- Course 3 & 4: Do the same thing with leaked NT 3.5 and NT 4.0 kernel. It's just for personal use so I wouldn't worry about the lawyers.

For reading, there are a lot of books about Linux kernels and NT kernels.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#222

Post by dirkc »

samiv wrote: post #138
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

Oh, the joy that awaits you when you come back home to discover how the gardener interpreted "please trim the hedge by the gate a little".

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#223

Post by jrmg »

serf wrote: post #24

6 or 7 , 38 now -- and having a blast. it isn't all funeral marches and group crying sessions. And don't let the blog post fool you , it is a rant about AI -- otherwise we would have heard complaints about the last 200 paradigm shifts in the industry over the past thirty years. Sure, we got our share of dilbert-style agile/waterfall/tdd jokes shoved in our face, but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity w…

but no one wrote a blog post about how their identity was usurped by the waterfall model

I don’t know about that.

Waterfall mostly died before the rise of blogs, of course, but around the dawn of Agile I remember lots of posts about how nothing was properly designed any more, nothing was ever finished, and you never knew what the specification was.

They used to be real engineers, but now it was just all chaos! They couldn’t design anything any more!

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#224

Post by [deleted] »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #92
sho_hn wrote: post #14

My advice to everyone feeling existential vertigo over these tools is to remain confident and trust in yourself. If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. My experience so far is that to a first approximation, the quality of the code/software generated with AI corresponds to the quality of the developer using the AI tool surprisingly well. An inexperienced, bad dev will still…

> If you were a smart dev before AI, chances are you will remain a smart dev with AI. I don't think that's what people are upset about, or at least it's not for me. For me it's that writing code is really enjoyable, and delegating it to AI is hell on earth.

[deleted]

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#225

Post by layer8 »

zero_shift wrote: post #74

I don't disagree that technology is less fun in an AI era. The question is, what other careers are out there for someone who wants to make things? About a decade ago, I went through a career crisis where I couldn't decide what job to do - whether technology was really the best choice for my particular temperament and skills. Law? Too cutthroat. Civil service? Very bureaucratic. Academia? Bad pay. Journalism? An indus…

> Academia? Bad pay.

I think that bad pay is preferable to no fun. Of course, academia isn’t exactly a bed of roses either.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#227

Post by dirkc »

alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned.

I still vividly remember setting up gcc in a docker container to cross compile custom firmware for my cannon camera and thinking about the amount of pain my local system would have been in if I had to do all the toolchain work in my host OS. Don't know if it felt like magic, but it sure didn't hurt like the alternative!

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#228

Post by CamperBob2 »

shafoshaf wrote: post #135
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

[55yo] My sense is that those problems we worked on in the 80s and 90s were like the perfectly balanced MMORPG. The challenges were tough, but with grit, could be overcome and you felt like you could build something amazing and unique. My voxel moment was passing parameters in my compilers class in college. I sat down to do it and about 12 hours later I got it working, not knowing if I could even do it. With AI, it i…

but so can anyone else and it just doesn't feel like an accomplishment.

So it's not enough that you get to do cool stuff, the important part is that nobody else gets to. Is that it?

If so, other sites beckon.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#229

Post by small_model »

samiv wrote: post #138
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

I just told my gardener to cut the grass and work on some flower installations. I'm so excited about gardening again. Can't wait to do some. Employing a gardener to do my gardening for me is really making me enjoy gardening again!

The proper analogy would be you can now remove all weeds with the swipe of your hand and cut all your hedges with another swipe, you still are gardening you can do it quicker and therefore explore different possibilities.

Re: I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed

#230

Post by robotnikman »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #126
alexgarden wrote: post #48

Wow... I really relate to this. I'm 50 as well, and I started coding in 1985 when I was 10... I remember literally every evolutionary leap forward and my experience with this change has been a bit different. Steve Yegge recently did an interview on vibe coding ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuJyJP517Uw ) where he says, "arch mage engineers who fell out-of-love with the modern complexity of shipping meaningful code…

> I don't personally think there is magic in building a Docker container. Call me old-fashioned. This seems like a false dichotomy. You don't have to do this. It is still possible to build magical things. But agents aren't it, I don't think. It is honestly extremely depressing to read this coming from a founder of Relic. Relic built magic. Dawn of War and Company of Heroes formed an important part of my teenage years…

Oh man, modding Company of Heroes was one of the things that got me into programming. I look back fondly on those memories.
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