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Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

rob.conery.io

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Re: Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

#2

Post by wyclif »

I thought this was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but when he says:

porting all that great shit backwards to JavaScript

...I understand what he means, but 'cmon, that ship sailed a long time ago. JavaScript won on the web. It's far from perfect, and something better will replace it, but JavaScript successfully met the demands of rapid development.

Re: Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

#3

Post by m0nastic »

wyclif wrote: post #2

I thought this was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but when he says: porting all that great shit backwards to JavaScript ...I understand what he means, but 'cmon, that ship sailed a long time ago. JavaScript won on the web. It's far from perfect, and something better will replace it, but JavaScript successfully met the demands of rapid development.

Without knowing what his next project is, maybe I'm mis-reading the statement; but I took that as more of a condemnation against the web than against Javascript specifically.

Re: Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

#4

Post by colordrops »

wyclif wrote: post #2

I thought this was entertaining, don't get me wrong, but when he says: porting all that great shit backwards to JavaScript ...I understand what he means, but 'cmon, that ship sailed a long time ago. JavaScript won on the web. It's far from perfect, and something better will replace it, but JavaScript successfully met the demands of rapid development.

Yes. As with any big project, the first revision is often unorganized spaghetti full of architectural problems. But with diligent iteration and refactoring, over time the project starts to take shape and becomes elegant. In this case, the project (the web) is huge, long term, and has a ridiculous amount of use cases and competing interests, so it's an amazing and wonderful thing that we've even settled on a lingua franca at all! Over time javascript will evolve, and a more elegant and robust replacement will eventually emerge to run universal sandboxed apps.

Re: Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

#7

Post by elliotec »

Anytime someone says "I think too much" I feel the need to speak up. This mentality is, from my experience, destructive. When I was on a Mormon mission questioning the beliefs and bringing it up to my superiors, that was the response I was given far too often and I've come to resent it.

The sentence before says: "I think I know too much" and that bogs down his creativity and energy. I'm calling bullshit. Who knows too much? How can you know too much? Does gaining knowledge really prevent one from being creative or energetic?

I think he comes closer to a point when he says: "it’s my attention to that knowledge which is destroying my inspiration." But I think its not the attention to the knowledge that is "destroying" his inspiration, but the way in which he uses that knowledge.

Why not give attention to the vast amount of knowledge gained writing web apps since IE4, and then use that knowledge to create novel ideas or better ways of doing things? Why not use the knowledge to create something better than JavaScript instead of complaining about it?

I think the point to take from this, at least for me, is to keep an open mind. He sort of said things contrary to that multiple times, but I want to believe thats what he was getting at.

Re: Staying Hungry, Staying Foolish

#8

Post by bsimpson »

> The problem is that when we start out as software developers we don’t know the “right way” to do things so we are less constrained in what we do. We just march forward and go do things. As we start to learn the “right way” to do things, we are often stifled by that knowledge and the constraints it brings and that causes us to be less productive or to over engineer and design solutions to problems.

I've felt that exact thing my entire career. I'm not a classically trained engineer - I'm a product guy who happens to be really good at building shit. Spending way too much time on sites like Hacker News over the years has taught me a bunch about how Internet loudmouths think things should be done. Learning these things has put me in the upper echelon of developers. I don't think of myself as an engineer, but I've been courted by some of the biggest names in software, and they pay me enough to comfortably afford living in the most expensive city in the country.

Yet, in spite of all of that, I'm fairly confident was more creative when I didn't realize that the obvious way wasn't always the best way, and I've wondered more than once what I might be making if I wasn't always keeping so-called best practices in mind.

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