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How to be the 10X programmer

blog-johnfn.herokuapp.com

1–10 of 20 posts

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#2
Good piece, but I felt like it was a bit disjointed. Specifically, it jumped from "10X" (productivity) to "-10X" (hindering others) without much segue.

I'd love to see more discussions of flow on HN. I'm particularly interested in the statement that Python leads to more flow for the author.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#3
That final remark about Rasmus is unnecessary and not in the spirit of the article. I agree PHP was not designed for developing highly complex applications, but you have to consider how much flow PHP actually created when developing small websites and web scripts.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#4

That final remark about Rasmus is unnecessary and not in the spirit of the article. I agree PHP was not designed for developing highly complex applications, but you have to consider how much flow PHP actually created when developing small websites and web scripts.

You're right, it was a dumb joke and it was in bad taste. I have removed it.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#5

Good piece, but I felt like it was a bit disjointed. Specifically, it jumped from "10X" (productivity) to "-10X" (hindering others) without much segue. I'd love to see more discussions of flow on HN. I'm particularly interested in the statement that Python leads to more flow for the author.

This is a good point. I actually trimmed this out of a larger piece, which is probably why it feels that way. I've edited the first few paragraphs to make it a little less jumpy - thanks for the comment.

Aside (not directed at you): I watched the article drop from #6 all the way down to #20 in the space of a minute. Does anyone know why that might happen?

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#6
I really dislike the footnote [3]. I think he shouldn't argue that the remaining margin of error doesn't matter, but instead should argue that it happens less often.

This is why safety critical systems are sometimes verified using model checking and so on. In some cases (airplanes, etc) even the best programmers cannot garuantee a necessary level of quality.

In your every day app where a user could crash teh program by using an obscure value, this still IS a significant problem. Especially if the error happens rarely it mike take a lot of time to be noticed for the first time and might have critical impact (loss of money?) by that time.

The important point is that the great developer will introduces less of those subtle errors.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#8

Good piece, but I felt like it was a bit disjointed. Specifically, it jumped from "10X" (productivity) to "-10X" (hindering others) without much segue. I'd love to see more discussions of flow on HN. I'm particularly interested in the statement that Python leads to more flow for the author.

In my opinion APIs are also very critical for flow, beside the programming language. If I see easily what I must use/touch to get things to work, I'll be productive. In contrast to big/strange named APIs where I need to read a lot of documentation to get the idea behind.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#9
post #4

That final remark about Rasmus is unnecessary and not in the spirit of the article. I agree PHP was not designed for developing highly complex applications, but you have to consider how much flow PHP actually created when developing small websites and web scripts.

You're right, it was a dumb joke and it was in bad taste. I have removed it.

Submitting an essay for others to judge, and then altering it after receiving criticism is not quite doing it right. Mistakes are okay, covering them up is not however. In my opinion a better way to deal with the issue is to cover the bad joke with strikethrough formatting, followed by rationale for doing so.

Re: How to be the 10X programmer

#10
How do you think code checking tools (FindBugs), buildsystems (Maven), version control systems (Git), ... has an impact to your productivity/flow? I think, this tools helps me a lot, because I just must write code, commit, write code, commit, ... and all other stuff runs automagically in background.
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