spot on. the fear kills motivation
A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
21–30 of 41 posts
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#22A programmer’s greatest enemy is getting stuck. Agreed. I often know where I want to go but can't seem to get there with code. This sucks and good programmers must find a way to get through this. A crucial skill in programming...is the ability to recognize when they’re stuck, Yes, and this is the only time I ever measure lines of code. Here is my metric: If I've been sitting at my computer (developing, not testing or…
My trick for getting unstuck is to start maintenance on the part where I'm stuck. Any kind of cleanup, comment clarification and so on will do. Once I'm doing that I'm doing something and moving from doing something to doing what I want to do happens more or less automatic at some point. I got this trick from working in a metal shop. We'd get stuck trying to solve a problem all the time, and whenever that happened we…
There is some simple elegance to this approach. I'm making a note of it for the next time I get stuck.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#23It is applicable in every part of life actually. Sometimes you notice that you are only spinning but not moving. Recognizing it is the key.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#24I've found explaining the situation to another person helps.
Usually having to make coherent statements about a thing causes me to realize what I am failing to put together.
Also, often whatever obvious thing I am failing to see stands out clearly to someone with fresh eyes. Those eyes could be someone else's. Or they could be your own.
Did you know that the human eye constantly moves around even when its staring at something? If it didn't, the same exact stimulus would eventually be invisible to it. They've held eyes completely still in the lab and kept the stimulus the same and eventually the eye stops seeing anything.
The same thing can happen to your attention when it constantly focuses on a problem.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#25Being stuck can seem like a waste of time because it’s holding up productivity on your current project. However, when I am stuck I often learn things about the platform, debugging tools, even things like how to use google and stack overflow well. I agree it sucks, but I’ve learned a lot being stuck.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#26I've found explaining the situation to another person helps. Usually having to make coherent statements about a thing causes me to realize what I am failing to put together. Also, often whatever obvious thing I am failing to see stands out clearly to someone with fresh eyes. Those eyes could be someone else's. Or they could be your own. Did you know that the human eye constantly moves around even when its staring at…
agreed. some people call it confessional debugging.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#27I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited job market here.
I've dropped out of college (a really good one, you should know it) because I couldn't afford it any more and I'm now working as a .NET web developer (4 years) with people clearly less knowledgeable about programming and the internet in general.
The most senior dev guy (works there for 14 years) is a cocky jog who only knows VB.NET, who advocates the use of POS content management systems such as DotNetNuke. His code is such a bad and unmanageable mess, I could supply thedailywtf with code excerpts for the rest of eternity. When you try to explain concepts such as anonymous methods to him his head explodes.
Do you think we have code versioning? Do you think we freeze functionality, have releases, or even any sort of requirements for our custom modules and libraries? No, every fucking web site has a slightly different version, it's a pure ghetto.
Sometimes I slack off for the entire day, browsing reddit, and with 30 minutes of coding I'm still more productive than any of ny work mates.
These guys don't know what the "cascading" in CSS stands for. "What is a selector?".
When I started I had to fix the all of our web servers, they crashed every day because of simple configuration mistakes.
These are guys that set up the dbs with a full transaction logging only to delete the transaction logs every day because they're getting too big.
"We" now made the decision to move like 400 web sites, (some of them are nationally known and get a lot of traffic), sites that expose public web services, sometimes have custom services running in the background that require os access, and more, to a SHARED web hoster where we don't have any other access than PLESK. Without any migration plan. Bringing up VPS or dedicated hosts will give you empty stares. They now started migrating and realized that well, it's not going to work out like this... durr... "what do we do now?"
These guys make CMS updates on a live server without informing the customers, if they're having a good day they at least don't forget to make a db and site backup first. Ah yeah, we also don't have staging servers. So most of the guys do development on live sites.
I tried to change things, introduce new practices, I tried really hard. But now I'm just bitter. Before I was a nice and outgoing guy, now I'm not even advocating for alternatives and I stopped giving input.
Man... I'm about to throw up
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#28I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited job market here. I've dropped out of college (a really good one, you should know it) because I couldn't afford it any more and I'm now working as a .NET web developer (4 years) with people clearly less knowledgeable about programming and the internet in gener…
Um you need to get in contact with some folks here at hacker news after you put a nice project up on github and contribute to haxe. The people you work with are not programmers. Programmers understand discrete operations.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#29I'm really stuck. I hate my job and dread every day of it. I'm too scared to move on somehow because of some ill form of loyalty towards its owner and a limited job market here. I've dropped out of college (a really good one, you should know it) because I couldn't afford it any more and I'm now working as a .NET web developer (4 years) with people clearly less knowledgeable about programming and the internet in gener…
Put an email in your profile. You are complaining about the right things, in a constructive way which shows you want to improve the system. There are a number of people hiring on HN who value that.
Re: A Programmer’s Greatest Enemy
#30The five minute shout. If you are stuck for five minutes, ask the room.
This is not an admission of failure. This is not an admission of incompetence. It's an admission that you're stuck. It's an admission that you are human. It's recognition that the project is more important than your ego. It's a chance to communicate with your team. It's a chance to laugh at your oversight. It's a chance to improve.
Just ask. No harm will come of it. And the chances are very high that you will become unstuck.