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Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

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Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#91

Post by gauravmc »

Rich Hickey's advice is shaped from his experiences and following his advice can lead to his kind of career. Rich Hickey and Peter Norvig, although both successful, have different experiences and hence different careers. If you ask someone like Bill Gates, he'll have another much different twist to his advice. Each successful collection of skills (deep, shallow or mixed) will lead to certain unique career; which one you regard highly is up to you.

Although an important caveat remember is, following some successful person's specific advice may not even work for you if there's a big difference in your basic brain circuitry compared to his/her. Your best bet, IMO, is to commit to the projects you feel 'hell yeah!' for and say no to the rest (more about hell yeah vs. no here: http://sivers.org/hellyeah).

The bottom line is: Never ask advice of someone with whom you wouldn’t want to trade places.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#92

Post by [deleted] »

balls187 wrote: post #59
d23 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to me. It sounds like they want people who have a wide variety of shallow-ish knowledge (but still an actual understanding of whatever area it is), while also having very deep knowledge in one or two areas in particular. > It also makes me wonder about their ability to manage people with different skill levels and areas of expertise. And of course, having used Steam, I'm not at all surprised. Weird that that's th…

> (Half-life, Counter Strike, TF2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, DoTA2... it's actually hard to name them all). Actually, it's not that difficult. Of what you listed, only HL was original IP. Valve put a lot of work into digital distribution, and have pretty much owned the PC digital distribution market. With console and mobile gaming dwarfing the PC market, and big publishers like Ubisoft and EA getting into their own digita…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#93

Post by Guthur »

balls187 wrote: post #87
yoklov wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as someone in the game industry, Valve certainly has it's problems, but they aren't platform problems. PC is stronger this generation than it was last generation, I'm not sure about the numbers but I suspect that it is ahead of both consoles, and it might be ahead of both of them combined, and I'd expect this to only be get more true. Porting to PC is pretty much just porting the parts that interact with the…

Respectfully I disagree with most of what you're written, wrt to growth. When I see my friends 3 year old daughter playing Geometry Dash on his phone, I know that the PC can't compete with that. PC ports are still and after thought. Games use a lobby system instead of dedicated servers. Only a few companies (Valve being one of them) target the PC market first. Pretty much every other AAA publisher looks at the PC mar…

The problem with your original statement is that you have combined Mobile and Console together VS PC, which is a pretty bad basis in my opinion.

PC vs Console vs Mobile would be a more reasonable competition.

From some reports PC gaming market seems very healthy indeed from monetary perspective.

http://usfinancepost.com/pc-still-gaming-market-is-double-co... http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2014-01-28-pc-gaming-m...

Mobile has been predicted to reach the size of PC gaming, but not to necessary dwarf it anytime soon.

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/research/3892.html

So certainly if you combine mobile and console it's larger than PC. Says a lot that it takes to distinct markets to overtake PC.

In my opinion all the platforms have their pro's and con's, and none of them are going to disappear anytime soon.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#94

Post by coldtea »

danenania wrote: post #85
coldtea wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First of all, you should know that there exists an A* , and what it can be used for. Second, you should know when to use A* or something else, the trade-offs etc. Third, you should know how to implement A* , when needed, with reference material (you'd be surprised how many programmers can't read/understand the reference material even when its given to them, or don't know enough programming to put it in code). Of cour…

Aside from as a learning experience or display of prowess, what's the point of implementing A* yourself? In my experience, knowing which prebuilt algorithms and data structures to reach for matters more than being able to implement them myself. Not saying there isn't value in learning or that it doesn't help flex the problem solving muscles, but in most software domains, I think that practically speaking there are mo…

>Aside from as a learning experience or display of prowess, what's the point of implementing A yourself?*

Because for people working in those kinds of problems we're talking about (we started from Valve and games IIRC, but it could also be Google, Facebook engineers etc) you don't just download some off the shelf API.

You'll need to create something of your own to:

- have the whole IP

- mold it specifically to the domain logic you need

- take control of it's memory and performance characteristics based on your constraints

- implement it in the language your company uses, for which no ready made A* (or some other algorithm) is available

- you'll need to make it talk to different infrastructure, libs etc

- you might be the one writing the library API yourself

As I said, this is not about what a CRUD programmer will need. But as you can see everyday in HN, people write these and other algorithms all the time in their jobs doing more serious engineering.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#95

Post by hoodoof »

Do some things deep, others shallow and pursue your fleeting interests - all will contribute to your levelling up.

Just make sure you do become deep with some things otherwise you'll be just a dabbler. You need deep expertise in some fields to be a power developer.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#97

Post by agounaris »

I think you need to have a few languages in your arsenal(but not too many), I like php, python and clojure for example. This doesn't make me an expert to all of them but given the proper time I am able to create any app in those languages.

Apart from this, it's true that you need to invest time in learning how to architecture staff... unix, networking, programming internals, keeping yourself up to date with whats going on in chaching, queuing, databases. Patterns and solutions to real life problems are have common solutions to any language/platform.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#98

Post by perfunctory »

dfan wrote: post #39

Rich Hickey is one guy and this is what worked for him. That does not mean that his experience generalizes to all developers. Listen to lots of people, perhaps weight their opinions based on their success and your admiration of them, and then make your own decisions.

I am not quite sure how to express it precisely, but the fact that in our field the phrase "Rich Hickey is one guy and this is what worked for him" doesn't sound ridicules, makes me a little sad. Mathematicians don't say "Pythagoras is just one guy and it worked for him."

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#99

Post by ckluis »

stalcottsmith wrote: post #73
ckluis wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

fwiw - appexpress.io - shows me almost nothing. I can’t even see what types of application components you have available or how they could be utilized…

Thanks, we will have a better front/landing page soon. If you're interested, go ahead and register to be notified when we launch a public beta. Right now we have a Wordpress-like-but-cleaner CMS with import capabilities, user management, and extensible admin. There are a few more pieces in the pipeline to complete before launch and much more in the works for later in the year.

Filled it out - but I’ll echo - lots of form fields for a solution where you don’t even know what you are getting.

Re: Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

#100

Post by throwaway49873 »

Programming is a craft. You'll learn to be a good developer by developing applications. Norvig and Hickey are more in the research domain. A far majority of application for any given platform will be written in the same languages, which mainly has to do with tooling. A lot of really good programmers are awful developers.
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