I can't access it because of CloudFlare limits. I didn't even know CloudFlare could be a bottleneck or effectively take your site as hostage until you pay.
The best programmers I know
191–200 of 320 posts
Re: The best programmers I know
#192For those unable to open the link due to owner site being hit by Cloudflare limit, here's a link to web archive - https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de...
There's some irony, is there not, in presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers" when you've created a programming blog that completely falls down when it gets significant web traffic?
I can identify a lion without being able to chase down and kill a gazelle on the hoof
Re: The best programmers I know
#193Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…
> When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answering questions on Stack Overflow rather than asking questions.
I don't think you can answer SO questions as a hobby any more. I used to do it on my morning coffee but at some point it got full of professional reputation growers that answered everything 30 seconds before it got posted. And when you do find an unanswered question the mods jump on you for giving "teach the man how to fish" answers instead of ready to copy/paste code.
Re: The best programmers I know
#194Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…
I recently started drawing (my own little middle age crisis) and i am so out of depth, so far from even understanding what is possible, and the internet filled with so much junk tutorials, that sometimes ability of LLM to parse my intent and guide me towards the key words and names is a godsend, of course it probably would be better to ask a person who knows this stuff, but it's not always convenient. In my use case…
This is not a LLM feature, but a failure of traditional search engines.
Re: The best programmers I know
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always get a lot of pushback for avoiding frameworks and libraries, and rolling most things by hand. But, most frameworks and libraries aren't built to be audit-grade robust, don't have enterprise level compatibility promises, can't guarantee that there won't be suprise performance impacts for arbitrary use cases, etc. Sometimes, a third party library (like sql-lite) makes the cut. But frameworks and libraries that…
This is smart if you work for a company that actually needs this level of robustness. The problem is that most don't, and a lot of people who work for these companies wish they were working someone "better"/"more important," so they pretend they actually do need this level of performance. The guy like you on a mission critical team at a cutting edge company is a godsend and will be a big part of why the project/compa…
I think many engineers would highly benefit from doing a 1-2 year stint working on safety-critical embedded software, where there are correctness requirements, and lives are lost if you're wrong or careless. It may not be everyone's bowl of soup, but it would at least expose you to that side of the world and you might learn something from the experience. Perhaps if everyone did this kind of tour of duty, something would rub off, and there would not be so much casual yolo carelessness in the "normal" software world.
Re: The best programmers I know
#196Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business. I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve. I'll thr…
> This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks
I was with you until this line. I've never seen a codebase where Not Invented Here Syndrome resulted in a stack that "antagonizes root cause analysis" in any way. I once worked at a C++ shop that had NIH'ed a supposedly thread safe string class, and it wasn't pretty.
There's plenty mature robust tech out there, and the chance that your own inventions are equally free of quirks and edge cases as battle-tested frameworks/libraries/databases that have had 1000s of eyeballs on them sounds quite unlikely to me, regardless of your programming skill.
Re: The best programmers I know
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's some irony, is there not, in presuming to be able to identify "the best programmers" when you've created a programming blog that completely falls down when it gets significant web traffic?
I can identify a lion without being able to chase down and kill a gazelle on the hoof
This is not a good analogy. Anyone can identify "a programmer". Identifying "the best programmers", or "the best lions" (in some respect) is an entirely different matter.
Re: The best programmers I know
#198> To know a tool well, you have to know:
> its history: who created it? Why? To solve which problem?
> its present: who maintains it? Where do they work? On what?
I'm not clear on that. Why does the person matter? So you can check if their political views align with those of your tribe, or what?
But then, I never read the user names on HN comments I reply to, and I guess the article author does. Maybe even keeps files on them...
Re: The best programmers I know
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always get a lot of pushback for avoiding frameworks and libraries, and rolling most things by hand. But, most frameworks and libraries aren't built to be audit-grade robust, don't have enterprise level compatibility promises, can't guarantee that there won't be suprise performance impacts for arbitrary use cases, etc. Sometimes, a third party library (like sql-lite) makes the cut. But frameworks and libraries that…
This is smart if you work for a company that actually needs this level of robustness. The problem is that most don't, and a lot of people who work for these companies wish they were working someone "better"/"more important," so they pretend they actually do need this level of performance. The guy like you on a mission critical team at a cutting edge company is a godsend and will be a big part of why the project/compa…
> The guy who wants to build his own ORM for his no-name company's CRUD app is wasting everyone's time.
I once unfortunately joined a project where an off-the-shelf ORM had been selected, but when development was well into the deep edge cases started to reveal serious design flaws in the ORM library. A guy wanting (perhaps not a in a joyful sense, but more not seeing any other choice) to build his own ORM that was mostly API-compatible was what saved the project.
This was a long time ago. The state of ORM libraries is probably a lot better today. But the advice of ensuring that a library is SQLite-grade before committing to it does rings true even for simple CRUD ORMs. Perhaps especially so.
Re: The best programmers I know
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is smart if you work for a company that actually needs this level of robustness. The problem is that most don't, and a lot of people who work for these companies wish they were working someone "better"/"more important," so they pretend they actually do need this level of performance. The guy like you on a mission critical team at a cutting edge company is a godsend and will be a big part of why the project/compa…
I think many engineers would highly benefit from doing a 1-2 year stint working on safety-critical embedded software, where there are correctness requirements, and lives are lost if you're wrong or careless. It may not be everyone's bowl of soup, but it would at least expose you to that side of the world and you might learn something from the experience. Perhaps if everyone did this kind of tour of duty, something wo…
On the other hand, do I want careless devs working in those industries?