181–190 of 321 posts
In another migration measured the time to cut and paste and concluded a day of grind was better than a week of scripting.
Many tasks have a thin path to completion surrounded by cliffs on either side. Experience teaches when to focus on the critical path only vs when to take a wider view.
There's easily a 10x productivity boost there.
Everything from the original post sounds reasonable, you should absolutely read it. Just some random thoughts to add to it: * For most of my past clients, the skill / output of their programmers was not the bottleneck, even though they thought so. As long as something is not a bottleneck, there's not point in trying too hard to optimize it (since you can get better ROI somewhere else). * Software is a team effort. Im…
Come on, Antirez is a x10 programmer, he coded one of the most brillant software of the last decade. It's so well done I use it as an example in my trainings, making people compile it to stop being afraid of building from source because I know it never fails and it's so damn simple. And programmer reading anything on his blog, or anything on HN for that matter, is not an average programmer anyway. The simple fact you…
Heck even the large recent trend among app developers and business analysts for low-code tools, tools that require mostly GUI and some code to get pretty complex applications going, offering maybe 5x-10x (or more) boost to productivity - that trend wasn't even mentioned at HN over the last few years, even though it seems like a really important trend, if you develop software or start businesses.
That just makes me wish there was a different type of community for entrepreneurs, one that is focused on democratizing creation and simplifying knowledge, in many fields - because those are the building blocks entrepreneurs work with.
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…
In defense of those people, the layout of the site is actively hostile to people on mobile. -10x for readability.
It's a design anti-pattern that makes the article difficult to read, even if you don't have a cognitive differences that make reading more challenging.
I've worked with people who could be classed as almost a 10x programmer. Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team. I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.
The argument in the above post would not classify those as 10x programmers. antirez is claiming that high quality design and a commitment to simplicity is a big part of what makes some programmers do much more productive.
What slows down my productivity more than anything is looking at someones code and thinking "Why did they do that?" Simplicity pay off in the long term.
However in reality, and what my comment was referring to, is that every sizable team has that one dev who rattles off code quicker than anyone else. Yes it works, but it will have a lack of comments, or they don't check in often enough resulting in merge issue or worst of all they implement a design pattern no one else has heard of.
I've worked with people who could be classed as almost a 10x programmer. Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team. I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.
The argument in the above post would not classify those as 10x programmers. antirez is claiming that high quality design and a commitment to simplicity is a big part of what makes some programmers do much more productive.
What slows down my productivity more than anything is looking at someones code and thinking "Why did they do that?" Simplicity pay off in the long term.
However in reality, and what my comment was referring to, is that every sizable team has that one dev who rattles off code quicker than anyone else. Yes it works, but it will have a lack of comments, or they don't check in often enough resulting in merge issue or worst of all they implement a design pattern no one else has heard of.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In defense of those people, the layout of the site is actively hostile to people on mobile. -10x for readability.
I'm sorry, for the kind of things I tend to blog about, monospace font was the simplest way to have a truly what-I-write-is-what-appears without using any markup. If I could start from scratch I would use MarkDown, however at this point if I switch all the past blog posts will be broken, or I should switch conditionally from a post ID >= but then the blog will be a bit inconsistent. I'll try to figure out a solution.
I've worked with people who could be classed as almost a 10x programmer. Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team. I have found that high-speed programmers tend to develop a very personalised workflow style. They do things their way, they code their way and forget that other people may have to maintain that code.
> Their code worked, but it was also incomprehensible to everyone else on the team. It's because the 10x programmer is too fast for the team. Therefore its code is not shared with the team (no time to explain, to time to document, no time to teach), so the team doesn't understand it. But it's not team's fault, nor the 10x programmer's. It's the delta between them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In defense of those people, the layout of the site is actively hostile to people on mobile. -10x for readability.
The site's layout and typography is actively hostile to readers in general, mobile or no. The choice of a monospaced font in spite of all readability, the letter spacing, the lack of headings, list marking or indentation, the extremely wide lines... It's a design anti-pattern that makes the article difficult to read, even if you don't have a cognitive differences that make reading more challenging.
I started the week as an 1x programmer. The lead on my current project micro manages every point of the code's architecture. I have no freedom to make any calls, even on legacy parts of the code that could be refactored to better fit new requirements. None of the other developers "own" anything so no one can make any calls. Anything takes a week or more to be discussed. Arbitrary non-obvious decisions have been made…
It took me a long time to realize I don't have to say yes to everything that comes my way. What happens if you say some version of, "I'm not going to do that"? It may or may not be tenable option in your situation.
It's like going to a party, the host keeps offering you food, you eat everything offered to you, and then blaming the host when you gain weight.
In this thread: mostly people responding to the headline, not the actual content of the article. There's some fantastic stuff in here about how great design is the key to increased productivity. For example: "It is very important for a designer to recognize all the parts of a design that are not easy wins, that is, there is no proportionality between the effort and the advantages. A project that is executed in order…
You've really got to have people who have a culture of celebrating trimming the fat at both ends to get to that.