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Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

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Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#171

Post by loumf »

Evbn wrote: post #159
akavi wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site? Nah. Naming it "A/Bingo" and hosting it on his own site for the intent of garnering linkjuice while at the same time presenting the name choice as simply a guileless, clever pun (as he does in his announcement of the project [1]) and within the context of his normal policy of broad disclosure? A little bit. Perhaps "grey hat" is too strong a word. Swap in "a little…

Um, "(The name sort of popped into my head and wouldn’t leave. It is a pun, it relates to my business and personal brand, and it gives the impression of Hitting the Target that successful testing should give you. " Please name a salesperson more open and honest than Patrick. Tell us who he should emulate. If people don't emulate Patrick's style, maybe they should follow Marc Pincus or Coffeefool instead?

I think perhaps Patrick didn't intentionally name it A/Bingo for the SEO, but he did understand the value OSS and link juice. If I thought of it, he certainly did -- but the name A/Bingo totally stands on its own as a really good name for this software in many ways.

http://www.jcdrepair.com/blog/your-business-has-more-to-offe...

Another example, and the one that inspired me, was one of the bloggers mentioned earlier. Patrick McKenzie runs a small, online business selling bingo cards to teachers (he sold over $45,000 worth of bingo cards in 2011). One thing Patrick does really well is search engine optimization (SEO). One of his techniques for getting people to link to his site (a big part of a high Google ranking), involves open source software. “What!?” That might be your reaction right now. What does open source software have to do with bingo cards for 1st graders?

The answer is nothing. However, Patrick is a software developer that wrote the code for his bingo card website. He recognized that some of the code he wrote was valuable all on its own. So he turned part of it into an open source Ruby on Rails project, put the code up on his site along with instructions on using it, and then told the world about it. What happened? All sorts of software developers, with no interest in bingo cards but a huge interest in his software, started linking to the portion of Patrick’s website that hosted this open source project. More links to his website meant a better ranking on Google which meant more sales of his bingo card creator. So while he didn’t directly sell his offering the way Amazon sold their’s, he did use it in a way that created more business for him.

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#172

Post by reiz »

Somebody told me the only difference between a young programmer and a old programmer is the experience. The old programmer did already a ton of mistakes. And if he learned from that, he is dam good. The young programmer will do a ton of mistakes and hopefully learn from that.

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#173

Post by bzdzb »

jemfinch wrote: post #142
edw519 wrote: post #37

How to be an Excellent Programmer for Many Years (Excellent==Successful. Money & fame are more difficult to control.) 1. Choose a small subset of available technology, learn it intimately, and embrace it. Then evolve that subset. 2. Understand the pros and cons of various data structures, both in memory and on disk. 3. Understand the pros and cons of various algorithms. 4. Understand your domain. Get away from your c…

"Never use early exits" is exceedingly bad advice, in my experience. What has led up to your claim that early exits are bad? As I've gained experience, I find myself writing code like this more and more: if (UnexpectedOrUnhandledCondition(x)) { ... return false; } if (OtherError(y)) { return false; } and so on. Serial code like that is trivially easy to understand when reading; more importantly, six months later, it'…

I agree. The alternative as you state is nested conditionals. Yuck! An alternative construct I have seen and used is to wrap code in a do {} unless(0) block and break to a single failure return or complete the block to a single success return.

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#174

Post by godbolev »

edw519 wrote: post #55
godbolev wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you please elaborate on No. 11? "Never use early exits". Could you please elaborate what you mean by that? PS. I'm not trying to unintentionally start a flame war. Just trying to understand.

Excellent question that is difficult to answer. I'll give you a short response here and then write a blog post with example code when I have time. Put your email in your profile and I'll make sure to let you know when that's ready. A little background: I have gotten many calls when legacy code has a bug or needs a critical enhancement and no one in-house is willing or able to figure it out. I'm no smarter than anyone…

I disagree because I find that it makes my code more elegant. A lot of smart developers I respect have also embraced early exits. But then again I haven't yet worked with large legacy codebases.

I'm still learning so I'd be grateful for a heads up if you make that blog post. I've put my email in my hn profile.

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#175

Post by GoldenMonkey »

exDM69 wrote: post #85
edw519 wrote: post #37

How to be an Excellent Programmer for Many Years (Excellent==Successful. Money & fame are more difficult to control.) 1. Choose a small subset of available technology, learn it intimately, and embrace it. Then evolve that subset. 2. Understand the pros and cons of various data structures, both in memory and on disk. 3. Understand the pros and cons of various algorithms. 4. Understand your domain. Get away from your c…

Always ignore advice that begins with the word "always". The use of "never" is never a good sign either.

know when to break the rules

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#176

Post by jonchui »

edw519 wrote: post #37

How to be an Excellent Programmer for Many Years (Excellent==Successful. Money & fame are more difficult to control.) 1. Choose a small subset of available technology, learn it intimately, and embrace it. Then evolve that subset. 2. Understand the pros and cons of various data structures, both in memory and on disk. 3. Understand the pros and cons of various algorithms. 4. Understand your domain. Get away from your c…

well worth the read. thanks!

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#177

Post by CalinBalauru »

hythloday wrote: post #113
edw519 wrote: post #37

How to be an Excellent Programmer for Many Years (Excellent==Successful. Money & fame are more difficult to control.) 1. Choose a small subset of available technology, learn it intimately, and embrace it. Then evolve that subset. 2. Understand the pros and cons of various data structures, both in memory and on disk. 3. Understand the pros and cons of various algorithms. 4. Understand your domain. Get away from your c…

"Never use early exits" is tantamount to saying "never study programming languages deeply enough to understand control-flow graphs". That's not simply a good rule of thumb, it's a terrifying omission. I would suggest that early exists are simply a matter of taste and never using them is the crutch that keeps junior developers junior. Data are on my side here: a quick perusal of the Quake 3, the Linux kernel, the Cloj…

Although 'never' is a very hard word, I found that in real live most code that uses early exists simply breaks SRP (come to think of it 99% of the time that is the case)

I know people will say "but I will only write this little return statement here" before you know it you will "add this little assignment before it returns" ...

Never might be strong but it make a very good point.

Re: Ask HN: What did the really successful programmers do differently?

#178

Post by mohit_agg »

they simply 'pursue excellence' and success follows.

they don't just think about adding a new feature, they are the one's that will say, 'let's re-architect the whole system', 'we need a better programming language'. they will read research papers, follow the latest in technologies and apply them in their field to create prototypes even if it's not part of their job.

good business people will appreciate it and back them up. if they don't they will probably find other people who will because they are passionate about it.

they can start their own ventures but who wants 10 companies like google believing in the same values, competing against each other, instead working for a company lets them focus more on their passion.

this is just what i think and i may be wrong. this is my first comment on HN. :)

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