Earlier quoted context omitted.
It depends. I've been coding for a living for 41 years and have a feeling I'll get the hang of it real soon now.
[flagged]
I aim higher.
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
121–130 of 323 posts
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the p…
> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?
Scrum forces you to package your work into daily sound bites. It pull your focus elsewhere and reframes your work in a wasteful way where you are always cutting off the corners because of how it affects your 30 second daily advertisement.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#123Just doing something for 10 years doesn't make you an expert, I started coding 11 years ago- as a kid. But my knowledge became so diffuse across topics I was interested in that I never really became an expert in any of it.
You became an expert in learning a variety of topics
Just doing something for 10 years doesn't make you an expert.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend of mine in a senior role uses it all the time and says it 2-3x'd their productivity. He architects everything using experience but simple but time-consuming sub-routines are done via an LLM. He also uses it to create tests for his code and is quite happy with how it performs in these areas.
What language does he program in? ChatGPT and CoPilot have increased my productivity, sure, but I don't know if they've multiplied it by 2, and definitely not 3. I mostly program in Rust, and while they are good, they still often produce things that don't compile. Iterating back and forth to get something that works takes time, and it feels to me like sometimes doing it alone would've been almost as quick. I could po…
They use CoPilot integrated into their IDE and mostly program with Kotlin.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
You became an expert in learning a variety of topics
Just doing something for 10 years doesn't make you an expert.
I think it does, just not in the things your measuring.
Sitting on a couch for 10 years will make you an expert. Not an expert in sitting on couches in general but an expert in sitting on your couch during the period you were there.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#126I think you never learn programming as it becomes more of an art at the upper echelons. For the fundamentals I would say 2 - 3 years of dedicated work is enough.
It depends. I've been coding for a living for 41 years and have a feeling I'll get the hang of it real soon now.
Then there's C++. After ~30 years of it, I realized that I don't know how to initialize an object anymore. So I've given up.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Believe me, I have plenty of criticisms of that entire culture but it has a lot of good ideas. What in particular (besides the obvious overwrought ceremony) do you find not worthwhile?
Scrum forces you to package your work into daily sound bites. It pull your focus elsewhere and reframes your work in a wasteful way where you are always cutting off the corners because of how it affects your 30 second daily advertisement.
Scrum just got taken out back. Agreed.
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
After 40 years of programming, 33 of that professionally, I can’t think of anything that was a waste to learn other than scrum. Syntax is something I never learned, I programmed with man pages and manuals open at all times. But every language and technology I learned taught me something useful about a fundamental problem in computing and systems. The way we address problems gets wrapped in different clothes but the p…
I feel most of my time as a professional software engineer has been learning stuff that I didn't need to. And I would argue that the majority of debugging time goes into debugging external code from libraries, the language itself, company-provided platforms, code, libraries, DLLs, experimentally figuring out how to use a system or tool that isn't documented, and more. It's pretty miserable. It'd be like being a carpe…
I don't think software is uniquely a mess behind the scenes...
Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#129Re: Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years (1998)
#130I’ve had a number of people approach me, at work and elsewhere, asking how they too can get one of those programming jobs. I always mention the timeline I was on, having started learning as a kid, making it a major hobby, getting a CS degree, internships, etc. and people are surprised and disappointed there’s no quick path. Or is there? Has anyone here done one of those 0 to 1 bootcamps with success?
Not sure If you'd count it as a bootcamp but I did something similar.
I taught myself to program Basic aged 11, using the manual that came with the early 80s Dragon 32 home computer (a whole 32k of ram). Wrote some simple games, worked out you couldn't really do anything cool without knowing assembly language, completely failed to learn assembly language, as it was too hard for this 12 year old on his own, armed only with a copy of https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/6809%2...
By the time I was 13 I'd given up programming and basically barely touched a computer for the next 15 years, did a History degree, bummed around as a musician for a few years and then, courtesy of the UK dole office, did a 3 month, 5 day a week, 9-5 course in Visual Basic, followed by a 3 month work placement. The company I worked for employed me when the placement came to an end and I've been working as a programmer for the last 25 years - although the last Visual Basic I did was about 24 years ago...
I think I was lucky that I hit the London job market as the first dotcom boom was starting, it seemed to be pretty easy to get a job back then and no one seemed that bothered if you had a CS degree or not. (I still don't have one)
I have done some academic CS courses (via Coursera) and did learn some interesting and useful stuff - but I think the most important thing to have if you want to be a good programmer is to have a self-directed mindset, you have to want go and figure stuff out and be able to learn on your own, using what ever resources you have to hand.
One of the things I like most about programming/software engineering is the fact that there is always more than one way to solve the problem, always scope for improvement and inovation