Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

mbuffett.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 327 posts

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#151

Post by __turbobrew__ »

trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

My productivity is rarely limited by the speed with which I can interface with a computer. Im in the same boat, I just use intellij for everything.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#152

Post by seabass-labrax »

trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

The author claims that a strong knowledge of development tools is a good indicator of general proficiency, but what if it's that learning how to use your editor makes you proficient? After all, nobody gets familiar with Emacs without inadvertently becoming a practitioner - if not an enthusiast - of Lisp!

That happened with me, and I'm now a big fan of functional programming, Clojure, Scheme etc., and that experience and exposure to a particular way of writing code has undoubtedly made me a better programmer. It sounds like you've had a similar experience with Vimscript :)

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#153

Post by coffeebeqn »

trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

It’s a little bit like some productivity blogs obsessing over the notepad and pens and apps they use and spending a lot of time obsessing/procrastinating over things that don’t matter. I still learn the same shortcuts I’ve used for the last 15 years in whatever editor I use but most of my time is spent thinking and talking about problems rather than just typing things in the editor

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#155

Post by imhoguy »

bdw5204 wrote: post #18
dano wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* This * - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

To the extent users do care about the tech, they care about performance not how "clean" the code is or whether you're using the newest framework. Users hate when software is slow or uses an exorbitant amount of memory.

And if the product is aimed at prousers/communities who extend the functionality themselves with their own commands, scripts and plugins.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#156

Post by CM30 »

dano wrote: post #5
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #3

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming. You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have. I would say (specifically to my young self): - There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding. - Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be m…

* This * - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

This 100%. It's especially noticeable in the world of game development, where you see games that are ridiculously buggy and poorly made (on a coding basis) selling millions of copies and changing the industry. The original generation 1 Pokemon games are probably some of the best examples of this, though I'm pretty sure anyone who's reversed engineered any game from the Atari era onwards has probably been left wondering "what the hell were they thinking?"

But it doesn't matter. They were designed well, they were fun to play, and millions of people enjoyed them.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#157

Post by nox101 »

tdumitrescu wrote: post #149
bobajeff wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. I don't spend most of my time typing but rather thinking. So getting good at vim or getting faster at typing will not make me any better. That's not to say that I'm not in favor of being good at typing. I know my keyboard well enough to touch type also I know some keyboard short cuts specific to vscode but they are intuitive and have a GUI alternative if I don't feel like using them.

I think everyone's got a different threshold for where returns start diminishing sharply. While I'm squarely in the "don't waste time micro-tweaking your editor" camp, there are some little bits of shortcuts and tooling that made me much more fluent at code-editing with very little investment. One example that stands out is the multi-cursor support that Sublime Text popularized (and which I use all the time in vscode…

more than multi-cursor, recordable keyboard macros save me a ton of time. I miss them sorely in vscode

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#158

Post by 999900000999 »

I'll add one point. You are not your job. Don't take things personally at work. And never be afraid to leave if you're not fitting in with your company .

I've left jobs over a few reasons, primarily bad managers, increased compensation, and bad code .

If people are writing bad code at your company, to the point where you know it's going to come back to haunt you later, it's okay to just walk away .

Don't embarrass anybody, don't escalate to a manager and explain how horrible the code is. I was in a situation where someone our team was effectively writing code that pretended to do things it really didn't. I got into a really nasty argument with half my team about this. I ended up putting in my two weeks, and then my manager was like oh you were right the entire time .

Life is too short to deal with incompetent people.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#159

Post by tdumitrescu »

Chris_Newton wrote: post #112
trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

Possibly my all-time favourite XKCD, Is it worth the time?¹ , demonstrates two important points. If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI. But for things you do moderately often that take a minute or even just a few seconds, you can afford to spend a surprisingly large amount of time optimising them and still get a big pay-off over a time frame measured in years…

> If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI

For code-editing, maybe. But in general software engineering, there are tasks that I have to do maybe once a year or less that are always way more painful than they need to be because I don't remember the details, and anytime I automate even part of them (or yes, just document a little better), it turns out to be well worth it. Stuff like bootstrapping new environments, some database-related work, etc.

Re: A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

#160

Post by bcrosby95 »

bobajeff wrote: post #32
trustno2 wrote: post #13

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors. When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing. Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vsc…

Same here. I don't spend most of my time typing but rather thinking. So getting good at vim or getting faster at typing will not make me any better. That's not to say that I'm not in favor of being good at typing. I know my keyboard well enough to touch type also I know some keyboard short cuts specific to vscode but they are intuitive and have a GUI alternative if I don't feel like using them.

For me it depends upon the task.

If I have to hunt down a bug or have something with a lot of touch points, yeah, there's probably less typing and more thinking.

But if it's a new mostly self contained feature usually I think for a bit, then get to the point where I know what I need to build and the next step is about shitting out a mountain of code. Being able to go from nothing -> mountain in a fast time is useful.

Post reply on HN