The self-hating web developer • Hacker News Board

Re: The self-hating web developer

#171

Post by pekk » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 8:53 PM UTC

lawnchair_larry wrote: post #52

patio11 wrote: post #20

There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…

Opinions come from passion. You don't care for opinions because you are not passionate about programming. You just want to get a job done. To you, these opinions are noise. The obvious counterexample: Linus Torvalds.

Linus Torvalds has been pretty coarse with his lieutenants in the past, but on the other hand he does not sit around in programming forums telling novice programmers that they should feel bad because they used a language which doesn't have static typing. That is a passion, but the passion is not programming. The name for that passion is "sadism" and while some sadists program, to a first level of approximation, if the primary output of someone is public sadism then programming is at best on that person's back burner, likely not something they're actually very good at, and plausibly not something they really even do.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#172

Post by Dylan16807 » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:02 PM UTC

LukeB_UK wrote: post #105

codingdave wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"uploading WordPress isn't web development" Sure it is. I know people who make a living at setting up Wordpress. They do it very well, and they work hard at it. They do design work that I cannot hope to match. And they do it all without writing any more code than some HTML and CSS. I'm not going to insult them by saying that they are not developing web sites. They absolutely are. Coders do not own the label of "web d…

You're pointing at 2 different things. Uploading Wordpress vs developing custom themes. Uploading Wordpress, using standard themes and installing plugins isn't development, it's admin. On the other hand, building custom themes or writing custom plugins is web development.

Developing a theme sometimes takes programming, and sometimes doesn't.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#173

Post by phantom_oracle » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:18 PM UTC

To the person who authored this piece of text that will apply in X-odd decades from now, I hope you inspire every coder in 2035 who is "starting out programming" to say:

Fuck your functional, static, super-fast, super-optimum, super-niche, super-scalable, super-everything language that only 64 other people in the world are using, that barely has any auth wrappers because your bus-factor of 2 prevents you from doing anything else except optimizing your compiler to be "almost as fast as C". I will learn my shit-hole language that the dickwards at GooFaceZon and the asswires at redundant CS colleges refer to as "a mistake of a programming language" because frankly ...

My shit-hole language will do many important things, among others:

- Make me productive

- Pay my fucking bills

- Allow me to learn, because I understand shit at this level, was not born a savant and don't dream in code (whatever the fuck that is)

- Allow me to live beyond the screen, because having a family, going outside and letting the sun touch your skin sometimes is good

So fuck it all, and fuck it all true and well. If COBOL and VB6 aren't dead, long live WordPress!

Re: The self-hating web developer

#174

Post by tracker1 » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:19 PM UTC

I don't know that I agree with the article's premise... while I feel for the author, and even the referenced poster in reddit... I have to say that I love web development. I started out very early on in the Web, I wanted to create interfaces and applications that people used. I'd spent time on BBSes before/since, and just want to create a usable system.

I started out with design work. I learned JS because I wanted to accomplish a given task... I read a big book (JavaScript Bible, 1st edition iirc), over a weekend, and applied that when I got back to work monday... over time, I became more interested in the backend... SQL, livescript, (now classic) ASP, VB5/6/COM/DCOM, and then C# when it came out.

The .com bust, while painful was actually a great learning experience for me. I knew C# was the next step out from VBScript/ASP, but I was unemployed... I managed to get the cheapest/complete book on C#, and without VS was stuck using the command line interfaces. It was a really interesting, and challenging experience. By the time I finally got to use VS2003, I really didn't care for it, but VS2005 was decent.

Since then I've dabbled in C/C++, F#, Perl, Python, Ruby and a few others... I've had Go on my radar for a while, but haven't had a use case for actually trying it yet. I've also spent the past 4-5 years advocating for NodeJS usage. I find the development paradigm it offers, and the constructs you can acheive (more functional composition, less classes) are closer to my mindset.

In the end I like knowing how different softwares work together, how the data is stored... to some extent, I don't really want to know the details down to memory access and drivers. At this point in my life, I have an understanding conceptually, but practically I don't care so much. I now know enough to not even hit certain bottlenecks, while not prematurely optimizing for others.

It's something that simply comes from experience and understanding that you can't know everything, and just trying to continue to learn and try new things. I get imposter syndrom like anyone else, but I understand that it's all part of the process.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#175

Post by pekk » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:20 PM UTC

hebdo wrote: post #160

coldtea wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linus is very talented. He is also a raging singularity of abuse Only if you have never worked in any team outside nice cosy polite and P.C. US programmers. And I wouldn't even consider him "abusing". He is ranty, fun, and vocal about what he thinks.

Exactly. It is not abuse to honestly review a patch or an idea, and block its progress pointing out serious deficiencies. This is just a way to assert quality, and apparently it is a very effective way - we do trust Linux. You are not the code you write. Accept the critical comments and improve.

Honesty is not abuse. But abuse is often misrepresented as honesty, and intolerance of abuse is often misrepresented as an inability to accept useful criticism.

Anyone who is actually concerned about honesty should be able to recognize the existence of abuse and draw a clear distinction between the two. But if every time abuse is brought up, you pretend that honesty was brought up, accuse the speaker of attacking honesty and mount a defense of honesty without ever acknowledging the existence of abuse, then it is clear that you simply reclassify all instances of abuse as honesty, and are really defending abuse. As a heuristic rule of thumb, that's a strong indicator that you are yourself a habitual abuser, because other people don't have much reason to defend abuse.

Everyone screws up from time to time, but it takes faulty rationalizations to keep screwing up in the face of criticism. If you see a lot of feedback which indicates you are behaving harmfully to others, your first conclusion should not be that the people giving this feedback are against honesty and criticism. You should ask yourself why you so often seem to run afoul of this kind of feedback, and why you are so defensive about it. Attacking people for saying "this thing you do is harmful" is an indication that you yourself are not good at taking criticism. And, considering consequences, it's probably even more important to be able to take criticism on doing active harm to others than to take criticism on the importance of garbage collection.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#176

Post by pekk » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:26 PM UTC

liviu- wrote: post #57

vorador wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Frankly, I have a hard time believing that the misanthropic commenters on r/programming are major opensource contributors. The most prolific programmers simply don't have time to waste on comment threads.

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F★CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f★ck does idiotic things like that? How did they not die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?" - Linus Torvalds, principal author of the Linux kernel

Linus was speaking abusively there, but he wasn't just speaking abusively: there was a context. That context wasn't that Linus spends hours every week trolling Reddit by putting people down and making snarky remarks about every new project. The comparison to Linus is really irrelevant and needs to stop.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#177

Post by PopeOfNope » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:32 PM UTC

justwannasing wrote: post #131

PopeOfNope wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind my asking, why aren't you still doing embedded programming? I'm a web developer looking to move to embedded programming and I'm always curious to hear about why people made the opposite decision. :)

Seasons change, and so did I. You need not wonder why. Things just fell that way. I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in programming for the web or the web at all. Then I was involved in an event that had no money and needed a web site. Which led to another. Long story short, own my own web dev company for 11 years and 10 employees and making more money than ever before.

Great answer, thank you. :)

Re: The self-hating web developer

#178

Post by ectoplasm » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:35 PM UTC

pekk wrote: post #170

ectoplasm wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wanted to say something like your comment is just 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, but then I'd be 2nd order making you feel bad about 1st order making people feel bad about 0th order making people feel bad, so then I just thought about how I felt and it was bad. What a mess. Good points about the importance of choosing a good peer group, I totally agree. It's really hard whe…

You think you're cute, but you're missing the point.

Thank you! I've written a new language for your comment:

::=

Its provisional name is Cute.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#179

Post by PopeOfNope » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:44 PM UTC

WiseWeasel wrote: post #123

PopeOfNope wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't mind my asking, why aren't you still doing embedded programming? I'm a web developer looking to move to embedded programming and I'm always curious to hear about why people made the opposite decision. :)

Not being aware of the parent poster's motives, I'll offer the exponentially larger job market for web development as a reasonable justification. While the vast bulk of organizations need web development done, embedded/systems programming is a relatively small niche.

Is it a relatively small niche, though? Anything that has a microcontroller needs embedded software written for it, which is a large and growing market of smart devices and doo dads. It's not as large as the web, but it's hardly a small niche.

The reason I'm interested in it is it's the opposite of the web. It requires small, deliberate programming as opposed to the bloat fest web programming has become. It's also physical, whereas web programming is entirely non-physical. After spending so much time in these digital worlds I've been a part of, I want to build real, physical things.

Re: The self-hating web developer

#180

Post by Gibbon1 » Sun, Jul 19, 2015, 9:50 PM UTC

I just have a small comment about the difference between professionals that went into the profession via the front door, college, certs, etc. And those the went into though the back door, learned on their own because someone somehow decided to pay them. Generally the latter are people that get some satisfaction out of the trade. But there a lot of professionals that went to school to become X and found they hated it once they got out. Yet they owe all this money, and they can't see any other way to earn the money they are used to. These people are usually very unhappy people.

The others that are generally happy with what they do, and aren't the type of people that like playing power and status games with what they see as the lesser races of programmer.

To the point, if you find a career you like, that's like hitting a home run in life. Letting unhappy people convince you to give that up is really terrible.