Ask HN: Essential skill needed to be a programmer?

There are many skills (curiosity, persistence, willingness to improve, etc) but IMO the most essential is being able to deal with your own frustration.

Learning what questions to ask into Google is a critical aspect. Most of the time, coding is the process of writing some code, and then debugging it. Knowing to ask, my graphql endpoint is failing with a status of 500, vs. my graphql doesn't work. The first will help you narrow down the issue, the second is far too generic. I have been coding for over 20 years now, and I feel it is rinse and repeat in terms of hitting a roadblock, and finding the answer. Also, a lottttttt of patience. You might take two hours to figure out something that ends up being really trivial, and then you have that moment of feeling good that you solved it, and then you are right back into the next hurdle.

Tenacity is the short version of what Norvig is saying.

A curious thing that happens every time I write code is that some unexpected error occurs. Sometimes it's trivial stuff, other times it's deep structure. Either way, you have to be bothered to make changes and test them. Sometimes this tree gets very very deep. See an error, Google it, find an example that mentions a new keyword, explore that cave for a day, return to previous branch, etc.

Something about this is related to addiction, I think I'm somehow fortunate to be addicted to something useful rather than just some molecule.

It’s applied problem solving. I often think of programming as invisible legos that you put together that build some sort of Rube Goldberg machine.

At many times during the process the formation isn’t expressed in code yet, so it’s up to the mind of the programmer to keep the pieces fitting together as intended until the code can be written and take a little bit of the lift from the programmers brain to expressed code.

- Communication skills

Being able to clearly explain why your solution will solve a given problem better than the alternative and listen to your colleagues when their suggestion is better than yours, will save you an incredible amount of frustration. It is in my opinion the most important skill I have learned

- Asking why when debugging

Finding the code that's causing a bug is only the first step. The next is preventing a similar one happening again. By constantly asking "why was this choice made", you end up finding the actual weak points in both the code and your process. Whether it's because a hack some other place forced you to write another hack, that then failed or because there was a deadline so the commit was made at 3am, there is an important lesson to be had. If you combine that with good communication, you can talk to the team about changing things, so you avoid creating similar bugs in the future. (Pro-tip: 99% of bugs are there because there wasn't time to do things better)