1000 Days on Hacker News – My Experience So Far

Interesting, I'm at 1084 days so I missed a chance at a round-number-blog-post.

I would echo many of the same things. I graduated with a computer science degree (and computer systems engineering) but up until about a year ago I had not written a single program. I've started kicking around with Python again, have signed up for Coursera courses that involve Github, AWS, and programming. As well, it's helping me professionally because I'm gradually moving away from VoIP technologies into datacenter networking where Dev Ops, AWS, IaaS, and the latest programming trends are important. I got an Arduino and started hacking around with it as well.

Even though I'm not at a startup, I try to treat my job with the same type of entrepreneurial spirit as those touted in the Silicon Valley Startup Echo Chamber posts. I try to keep in mind many of the core entrepreneurial concepts - fail fast, iterate, A/B test, get feedback, focus on value, user experience is paramount, etc in mind with my comparatively tame 'cushy' corporate job.

So as much as anything else, thanks HN.

Simply put, To read HN front page is a huge part of my "get-into-the-zone" ritual before start to code! :)

Just checked for and I joined 8 days prior to you. 1092 so far.

I remember stumbling upon HN a few months prior and initially was wondering the 'hacker' part but for whatever reason my google search for a few weeks was always redirecting me to some HN threads one way or another.

So finally decided to stick around :-)

> Maybe the TLDR of both our posts is we should be submitting more of what we see? Would anyone else upvote an interesting hardware startup / entrepreneur type story as opposed to the prevailing common software ones?

I don't know if this is an actionable problem, as it depends on the interests of the community, which are, in turn, governed by who they are and what they do. If other types of developers join HN in large numbers, the situation might change, and it will benefit even web-based SV startups, too.

But there's another problem. A few years ago I was working for the defense industry, and hadn't even heard of HN. We were doing distributed, fault tolerant systems with graceful degradation – things that have since become very interesting for "web" (in the wide sense) developers. Obviously, much of the work done there is classified, but even the parts that aren't don't get discussed much because that community hardly blogs at all.

So it's not just a function of what gets submitted or upvoted, but of what "content" (how I loathe that word) is out there, and developers in other industries just don't write of their experience as much (which is a shame because we could all benefit from that). Once in a while we're very lucky to have some technology leak from the often maligned (here on HN) "enterprise". Look how much we've learned from Erlang, that for years was the sole domain of telecom. Or Clojure, which is a result of Rich Hickey's experience in projects that are very far removed from web startups.

Slashdot wasn't that different in its early days, a little less startup and a little more Linux.