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Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

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Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#111

Post by teeray »

billllll wrote: post #106

Some of the worse engineers I've ever interacted with had too strong of a "taste" for what they felt were right and were completely unable or unwilling to work outside of that. Developing a superiority complex because you think you have "taste" is a great way to torpedo your team. Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage…

> Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.

Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#112

Post by kgwxd »

joshdavham wrote: post #97

Could someone here pitch me on neovim? I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?". Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's becau…

For one, you don't have to figure out how to remove whatever random AI UI element and integration MS decided to introduce and turn on by default every update.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#113

Post by 1123581321 »

stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

If your friend keeps mastering coffee he'll learn to appreciate what Folgers or Starbucks is doing again. He'll also learn to suggest the coffee that will make someone happiest, or help them the most, in a wider variety of situations. It's nice to retain youthful oblivious in some categories, though. We can't learn everything anyway. It's often enough just to know how to avoid expensive mistakes.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#114

Post by hansvm »

cyberax wrote: post #93
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

On the other hand, a part of becoming an expert in some field should be getting to be _realistic_. Learn not to deceive yourself. I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's pro…

That's not a bad rule of thumb, but it's also easier to get dry, poorly seasoned rice, mushy fish, overdone or poorly done sauce and toppings combinations, and >1 day old uni than I'd really like at a lot of places.

Your advice makes sense when your local options are good enough, but I don't think you're actually arguing that quality doesn't matter -- only that beyond a certain point the additional discernment isn't valuable.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#115

Post by heavyset_go »

grugagag wrote: post #79
heavyset_go wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun. I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll…

Lucky you! You didn’t fall into that trap and just enjoy the best experience you could get without overoptimizing for it. I fell into the musical instruments trap for a bit but luckily I got out of it and play with what I have.

I messed up in that domain when it comes to music software, it's tweaks all the way down, amazing that it works at all. I make do with cheap MIDI controllers, but spend hours cracking VSTs I already bought so I can run them in Linux.

Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#116

Post by sowbug »

In my day, we'd say that as kids we'd take apart all our toys to see how they worked. We didn't necessarily call the end goal "taste"; it was to understand how things work, and to learn which results require which trade-offs.

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#117

Post by Rileyen »

I’m starting to believe that taste in code isn’t something you’re born with. It’s something you build after getting burned by your own mistakes again and again. I used to think some code just looked nice, but now I can explain why it works.

How did you develop your sense of taste in code? Any stories or lessons worth sharing?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#118

Post by sokoloff »

SchemaLoad wrote: post #80
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

At some point I think there's almost an inverse relationship with how much time you spend researching a product and how much you enjoy it. I fell in to this hole with gaming monitors. At the top end, no product has it all, no product is without flaws. So then you start getting frustrated that you can't find one that has the right HDMI version, freesync, 240hz, 4k, USB-C with decent power delivery, etc. And what you b…

I definitely suffer from this "do enough research until I find flaws that I then can't un-see".

When my older kid wanted a gaming monitor, he suggested a specific model because it was on sale and he could afford it. I took that opportunity to do some research solo that night, find a few alternatives, research each deeply and then suggest that we "look together at 2 or 3 different models", compare the features, and talked through whether it really mattered if one was $100 more than the other given the likely useful lifespan of a monitor.

He ended up with a monitor that he's really happy with, we got some time together bonding over a shared interest, and he doesn't have to know all the flaws I saw in it. (It's also barely mid-tier, which is congruent with your advice.)

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#119

Post by bee_rider »

heavyset_go wrote: post #75
stavros wrote: post #74

Decades ago, an old friend told me "I became a coffee expert, I learned everything there is to learn about beans, the ways to prepare them, the chemistry that goes into it, and now I can only enjoy a cup of coffee prepared by the most expensive machines from the most expensive beans. The shit part is that I enjoy it just as much as I enjoyed my shitty supermarket coffee back when I didn't know anything about coffee."…

This is the way I am with hiking and biking. I genuinely enjoy them, but I have a tendency to really get into the weeds with things I'm interested in and ruining the fun. I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll…

Hiking and biking as your “I’ll love the inexpensive options” hobbies. Did you intentionally pick the maximum test of will or something?

Re: Tinkering is a way to acquire good taste

#120

Post by creer »

Except "taste before skill" is a well known issue and source of frustration for starting artists: They can already see what's good and they know what they want to do, but they don't yet have skill in measure with their taste and get locked in a feeling of inadequacy. They resolve that if they stick with it. So, taste looong before skill.

So...

> If you don't tinker, you don't have taste

> Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.

No. That's not how it works.

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