181–190 of 207 posts
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Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.
Oh, i was thinking about another f word.
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I do the same. I'm not really here for the articles - they're secondary - but for the excellent discussions by the community
Same here but when I comment, I check out the article
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Lemond's statement is in reference to racing. The race isn't won in zone 2. Same with programming. Nothing wrong with a lot of zone 2 programming, in fact it's quite important to maintain balance like you describe, but the race isn't won with comfortable work.
I’ve seen my share of programmers who showed off all-nighters and productive weekends, only to realize they compensate but not actually working productively their entire 40 hours, not even half. Programming is not a race, it’s a marathon.
When pulling an all-nighter or weekend, all of that stuff goes away.
It’s been a long time since I pulled and all-nighter or weekend, but I’ve been thinking about it just so I can feel like I finished something. If I could get actual heads down time during my 40 hours, I’d much prefer to use that time.
23 years of solid experience in programming. The hardest parts for me have been: - integrating with other systems, often APIs. The difficult part is the constantly changing API contracts, which break integrations in often unpredictable ways - Leaning new libraries or frameworks that often reinvent the wheel for no good reason - Understanding the deep layers of abstraction in some systems (be it a DSL, a transpiled la…
Painfully aware that my soft skills need improving but I'm not sure where to even start. I've started prepping more before important meetings but I'm easily so lost in code that I forget meetings are even happening sometimes.
For me, I ended up in the business school when I went to college. That probably did more for my soft skills than anything else. It forced me to learn out to write things that were more than 2 sentences long… not through a class or direct teaching, but by necessity. I always try to think about my audience when I do anything. Who is a presentation for, who is an email to, what am I trying to convey? In sprint demos to those who will consume things I make, I don’t get technical at all, I focus on the value it will provide to them. How will it save them time and toil? How can they consume it? That’s what they care about. It doesn’t matter how technically impressive something is if people can’t consume it, don’t know how to use it, and it doesn’t help them in some way. Some of my team members didn’t like when I tried to sweep their tech talks under the rug, but our stakeholders said we had some of the best presentations in the company as a result. We didn’t bog them down and lose them in jargon, and instead we focused on what mattered to them. We saved the tech talks for internal presentations with people who would get value from them.
The same goes for your boss. Your job is to make your bosses life easier. Do that and you’re golden. Make their life harder and it will probably be reflected in reviews. Always try to put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
If I need to prep something for a future meeting, I try to do it right when I hear about it and it’s fresh in my mind, before I get distracted and it becomes an item on my backlog. Then I stick it somewhere I know I can find it when it’s time for the meeting (or send it out before the meeting so people have a chance to review it). In terms of image within the company, I think this stuff matters a lot, so I raise it high up on my priority list. Plus, if I’m not prepared for the meeting, it means I’m wasting other people’s time, which isn’t good. Even worse if it means we have to have yet another meeting.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Soft-Skills-software-developers-manua...
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Agreed. I've said forever that I spend one month a year coding, and 11 months debugging, testing, documenting, negotiating, packaging, releasing, supporting.
There's been academic studies on this. The average hourly productivity as measured in lines of code for professional developers is very low. Along to order of 1 to 2 lines of code per hour. This is because of all the other communication and synchronization that you mentioned that needs to happen.
This is one reason why lines of code is a poor measure.
Been programming over 30 years, since I was 8 years old and my dad’s coworker gave me his old BASIC programming books and I was hooked. I have always found programming easy, and still do. It is just fun, and I still love learning new languages and tools and paradigms. It is still my favorite hobby. However, WORK is hard. Dealing with office politics and changing priorities and bad leadership and meetings and TPS repo…
This is why I don't worry too much about AI. It can write the code better and faster than I do? Wow, you just freed up 5% of my day.
Spend 20 minutes writing a function to do something, and 3 months of meetings discussing what the value of X should be in that function… but Copilot is the answer…
Reading the comments here, I am having a total Slashdot throwback moment. Did anybody actually read TFA? Most of the replies I am seeing here seem to have treated the article's title as a writing prompt. Read the whole article friends - it's got a nice amount of nuance and the author unpacks what they mean by "difficult" very well.
Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.
Amusingly, https://www.google.de/search?q=what+does+tfa+mean shows https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19781756 as the first hit for me.
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Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.
I genuinely thought it meant The Fucking Article until now (like RTFM)
Programming can be made easier with LLMs. I'm working on this: https://aiconstrux.com.
Reading the comments here, I am having a total Slashdot throwback moment. Did anybody actually read TFA? Most of the replies I am seeing here seem to have treated the article's title as a writing prompt. Read the whole article friends - it's got a nice amount of nuance and the author unpacks what they mean by "difficult" very well.
Off topic. I didn't know what TFA was so I googled. It didn't help (a cursory search). So I asked chatgpt, that helped. The Full Article. I, of course, knew what you meant.