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How do I know if I'm good at programming?

danielslater.net

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Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#131

Post by e12e »

fundabulousrIII wrote: post #120
std_throwaway wrote: post #60

The best programmer is the one who can solve the problem effectively and efficiently without even touching the keyboard. You don't have to be "good". You have to solve the right problem efficiently. Find the right problem and be the solution. If you need to write a program, make an easy one. Easy to use and easy to maintain. You'll get what that means after a few years of maintaining. Nobody ever cares if you're a "g…

What you describe is application and systems architecture and requires domain knowledge. Excellent programming requires the ability to create a functional blueprint in whatever way/shape/form is decided and do so without undue time and cost.

Maybe programming is to system architecture as tactics is to strategy. Which would probably mean management is to system architecture as logistics is to strategy?

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#132

Post by owebmaster »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #25
StephenMelon wrote: post #18

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…

I don't know if I agree. I have friends that can smash out amazing code in very little time. Looking through some repositories of programs I like, some of them were prototyped in very little time, but with a surprisingly excellent first revision. I had the pleasure to work with Zed Shaw quite some time ago, and even though his code might not be perfect, he writes a lot better code than the vast majority, in a lot les…

Like git. The first commit talk by itself: it was made using git. Software that works.

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#133

Post by noir_lord »

StephenMelon wrote: post #18

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…

I'm type 2, I like fixing things though I just inherited a system that is so bad I'm struggling to figure out where to even start, might be the first time in my career where a rewrite might make sense.

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#135

Post by animal531 »

Animats wrote: post #119
StephenMelon wrote: post #18

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…

All the founders of Autodesk were of the second type. Most were mainframe OS maintenance programmers who fixed kernel bugs in assembler. A big issue for AutoCAD was "don't lose the user's work". Customers were not forgiving of that. New features were less important. Autodesk is still around, market cap around $26 billion. They're still selling expensive software that works, and have been profitable for over 30 years.

Just a small comment on AutoCAD. Any software product that's successful for 34 years is pretty impressive in my book.

3d apps especially seem to suffer from bloat, which then leads to competitors getting the leg up and the original dying off; then repeat for the competitors.

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#137

Post by fundabulousrIII »

e12e wrote: post #131
fundabulousrIII wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you describe is application and systems architecture and requires domain knowledge. Excellent programming requires the ability to create a functional blueprint in whatever way/shape/form is decided and do so without undue time and cost.

Maybe programming is to system architecture as tactics is to strategy. Which would probably mean management is to system architecture as logistics is to strategy?

Good analogies.

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#138

Post by matrixtransform »

gregmac wrote: post #59
StephenMelon wrote: post #18

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…

Full of bugs (non working) functionality that constantly causes customer issues is not considered "rockstar". It might appear that way up front, but the lasting reputation will be from the success (or not) of the final product, including whatever post-deadline work is done.

Perhaps he meant "rockstar" in the Ozzy Osbourne sense of the phrase? Flawed, temperamental but still capable of dazzling in the right context :)

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#139

Post by dozzie »

wolfgang42 wrote: post #130
jplasmeier wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More readable code almost always means less efficient code." Can you give examples? I'm not sold that the "low hanging fruit" of readability improvement (empty lines to break up "paragraphs", breaking up unintelligible one-liners into several lines, etc.) degrades performance. My intuition is that the compiler/interpreter ends up producing almost identical runtime code and therefore similar performance. Unless you m…

Take the following code, which I had occasion to write this morning: foreach (var item in items) { if (items.Where(item2 => item.Upc == item2.Upc).Count() != 1) { item.Duplicate = true; } } This is the most readable and straightforward code I could come up with for the task; it's also not particularly efficient, since it does at least twice as many comparisons as necessary (more if there are actually duplicate items)…

Ever heard of these things called "hashes" a.k.a. "dictionaries"? They are magical boxes for elements that are indexed by name. You build such a magical box of seen elements while going through the checking loop and you get the time complexity of O(n) or O(n log(n)) instead of your current O(n^2), so it won't explode when you get more elements passing through the code.

Note that this was conceived in just a few minutes of reading your code, deciphering syntax only remotely familiar, and figuring out what was it supposed to do, all with cold start (I haven't written much today yet). Something went wrong with your thought process.

Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?

#140

Post by pc86 »

StephenMelon wrote: post #18

There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…

Let me guess, you feel you're in the second category? You know it's possible to draw distinctions between different methodologies without disparaging the one you feel is different than you.
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