21–30 of 207 posts
Yes, incredibly difficult. Nearing 20 years in the field now and programming is still as difficult as in at the start. Or maybe more so, because you are so aware things will break on the first try anyways. Always. Most important lesson for me is to stay close to the problem domain. Think deeply about what your domain means and model in code accordingly. Staying close to the true meaning of your application beats all…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. programming is the act of writing code, it should absolutely get easy. I think you meant software development rather than programming.
Even with just programming, I'd agree with what simonw wrote. Over my life, I've done Commodore 64/BBC/REAL/Visual BASIC, C/C++, IDL, python, bash, Java, PHP, ObjC, Swift, and JS, all of which have their own "right way" as they have different abstractions. Even just with those last three, the "right way" has changed significantly since I first started using them — used to be of vital importance to understand manual m…
At some point in your career the challenge has to stop being about the mechanical aspect of programming and become about larger, more holistic, concerns.
Yes, incredibly difficult. Nearing 20 years in the field now and programming is still as difficult as in at the start. Or maybe more so, because you are so aware things will break on the first try anyways. Always. Most important lesson for me is to stay close to the problem domain. Think deeply about what your domain means and model in code accordingly. Staying close to the true meaning of your application beats all…
> Types, tests, frameworks, dry, language features, ci pipelines, scrum whatnot. All just fun party tricks that fall short when your building the wrong thing.
Some or all of these might be excellent tools in service of solving your problem in its domain. They may be even essential for solving it. And they might be the wrong tools. It’s situational, and evaluating the appropriateness of each, how and why they fit, is part of modeling the problem domain just as much as designing the appropriate data structures, or state machine flow, or any other mechanism for expressing the domain.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I mean software development. I don't find the semantic distinction between that and programming particularly interesting myself - why write code if you're not doing that do develop software?
Because you might have architects specifying exactly what needs to be programmed, so the software development part is mostly done.
If programming ever gets easy it means you're not seeking out new challenges. On top of that there are all of the other professional skills you need to develop to be a really effective software engineer: communication, writing, planning, navigating organizations, figuring out the best thing to build and how to effectively make the case for it. The thing I like most about this career is the amount of depth it has - th…
I mean, that's kind of tautologically true, but doesn't really say anything?
You're not obliged to seek out challenges, and may not even benefit for it if you just chase them randomly. You can just get good at something that consistently needs doing, then make that your job, and let it become easy. (And then you can look for challenges elsewhere in life if you want)
And notably, there are people who pursue the trade and just never get it to "click". Especially now that the trade teases doctor/lawyer/finance lifestyles instead of just engineer lifestyles. It draws in a lot of people who commit themselves to decades of stress and Sysephisian uphill grind on the easy stuff.
People who have never seen it get easy should check in with themselves and make sure they like what they're doing anyway. While you can make it hard when you want by "seeking out new challenges", it should get to a point where that's something you can choose to do when you want to do it, with the work being quite easy when you're not.
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…