131–140 of 396 posts
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 will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else. Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
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…
1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...
> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because. I think in this age of vibe coding where anyone can code anything, the discriminating factor between two developers, at a technical level, just comes down to "good taste" (lots of other more important factors, too, like a good human to work with). And like the…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ta…
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…
Neovim worked the same just about everywhere and I could choose my terminal. Especially with tiling, for me it's just feels better.
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…
> I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability
> Is it because it's faster?
> Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine?
I did convert myself from a minimal vscode setup (disabled everything & only LSP extensions) to LazyVim nvim a few months ago. I had to tweak my .config/nvim, relearn Lua again, and read the manual. It took me about a week to settle things down and get used to basic nvim bindings.
After another week of suffering trying to fix JDTLS (Java LSP) integration, I'm enjoying my nvim setup. Unlike vscode sync which requires you to login, I could just git clone my `.config/nvim` and I'm good to go.
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…
But here's what I learned after a long time trying different things and what's worked.
Don't try to find objective reasons for making big shifts in your workflow - be that a change of your major tool, language, technique, or paradigm. What I mean is: don't try to decide if any concrete tool would be good for you. Instead, try to understand the big underlying idea behind the tool. Once you comprehend the abstraction, choosing a concrete implementation of that idea wouldn't really matter - you can carry the big idea with you regardless of one concrete implementation.
In practice, here's what I mean: the idea of vim-navigation is absolutely beautiful, pragmatic, and fantastic, and it's positively worth every minute of the initial learning curve. It's really not that hard - it only requires just a bit of dedication and discipline. I honestly don't understand programmers who choose to be in this field, yet outright reject the mere idea of it after trying it for like six minutes.
Just go with it - you probably will hate me, everyone else in this thread, and yourself for a few days, but then it will grok. Once you have a good understanding of its tenets, you could easily take it to whichever medium you choose to stay in and it doesn't even have to be neovim.
Neovim might be great for you, and maybe not even as a concrete tool to achieve defined goals, but even as a head-start medium to understand the 'big idea' of vim-navigation.
Finally, whenever picking up a new thing, maybe don't try to find elevator pitches. After the initial acquaintance - Wikipedia, GitHub pages, etc. - google instead: "Why does [that thing] suck..." and maybe try instead to find compelling reasons to remain skeptical. Trying to remain unconvinced may help you find perspectives for why a certain idea is a matter of fact might be a good one to have in your pocket.
I used to resonate with the word "taste" as a distinguishing factor between good and bad quality, but a comment on HN some months ago about one of the many blog posts that talks about taste really nailed it: "Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things. When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities. The more I thought…
One of the greatest developers I've worked with, who I learned a lot from and respect immensely, has extremely different tastes in software from me. To the point where I wouldn't say I think he has good taste.
But, his work still has a distinct style and intention. I can tell anytime I come across libraries he had a hand in. I understand what the code is doing and why is is correct, even when I disagree with it.
And I think that is what is important. When working with more junior people, I'll ask them why they did things a certain way and will generally me be with a "well, idk" of some variant of path dependence.
I think developing that intentionality as a developer is important. Which does come with some amount of aesthetic, and I think taste is a defensible metaphor.