Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 139 posts

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#21

Post by edw519 »

56 instances of the word "I". That's your problem. All the rest is fluff.

OP, try rewriting this, substituting "he", "she", "they", or "you" for "I".

Funny how quickly your perceived problems melt away as soon as you stop dwelling on yourself and start focusing on others.

Edit: I realize that OP is being slightly sarcastic, but I took this as an opportunity: This is a condensed version of pretty much the same feedback I've been giving people struggling with themselves for years: It's not about you! As soon as you get that, you can move on.

A recent instance:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5763484

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#23

Post by lampe3 »

Jesus when i read this Article I see me... I love to start new Projects but i never finish them(only when i must because i customer is kicking my ass)... I always have a lot of motivation... but when i sit down and must read or do something i lose focus very often and maybe work on it for 30 minutes or 1 hour and then i start to watch some stupid youtube videos...

To this day i dont know how to focus... I got depression last year because... i dont know everything was not going the way i wanted but i dont changed anything... today i feel better but i still cant get things done... i was reading books/blogs/etc about how to organize/focus/motivate but nothing every really worked for me... not money/fame/etc helped to motivate...

maybe someone can help or share tips... and if you want dick around you can but i want answer or comment you...

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#24

Post by JonnieCache »

volume wrote: post #15
JonnieCache wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's that even more annoying modern invention: post-irony, where the writer doesn't have any faith in their own ideas so they hedge their bets with this strange kind of noncommittal sarcasm. It is the plague of the modern age, and the real reason why hipsterism is so hateworthy.

If possible, I tend to look up words/terms I've not heard of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-irony ... are you saying in my effort in sounding all serious and sincere, that I, in fact, align myself with hipster philosophy and world views?

No. Unless your sincerity is merely the surface layer below which there is sarcasm, then another layer of sincerity, then a layer of irony, then more sincerity, and so on to the point where you have absolutely no idea of what your real opinion is, because you never had one in the first place.

Notice how 5-10 years ago, people were wearing ironically bad second hand clothes from the 80s, because it was fun, and it marked them out as "in on the joke." Then over time, that became so much the fashion that the definition of "good" clothes realigned itself to cover these things, so now people are walking around with handlebar moustaches, tie-dye hotpants and wolf moon shirts thinking its completely normal. The lines have been blurred, "good" and "bad" are slowly breaking down as concepts, replaced with "in" and "out."

The only way to escape it is to simply not think about any of it, and have absolute faith in your own objective internal preferences, whatever they are. Aesthetics is the only arena of thought in which fascism is not only acceptable, but morally right. Make full use of this fact.

EDIT - see also: the rapgenius blog currently on the frontpage: http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-how-rap-genius-raised-s18m-i...

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#25

Post by quackerhacker »

eightyone wrote: post #18
quackerhacker wrote: post #6

I think coding kinda forms us to be perfectionists, because a small mistake can disable entire programs. I'll share my epiphany that I've learned from HN that PG said...if we're not embarrassed at launch time, it's too late. Being a perfectionist my self, it's a brilliant statement.

Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, has a similar quote, "If you're not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late." I don't know if one came before the other. Reguardless it's a good sentiment to have. The only thing that matters is launching. You can find the perfect shade of blue for that button after you launch.

Funny you mention styling, this is where a lot of my time gets consumed...CSS3 (love & hate)

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#27

Post by volume »

Gigablah wrote: post #12
volume wrote: post #5

In all seriousness I believe I have pretty sharp Internet sarcasm detection skills but I can't tell without more context how much of this post is sarcasm? If others didn't see it that way, can you re-read it again through a "this is pure dripping sarcasm" lens/filter? I read it as a sarcastic detailed break down of the excuses new developers use nowadays to justify their lack of discipline. Or.. am I wrong?

You're reading too much into it, it looks like straightforward self-deprecation to me.

Just as proof of my sincerity - I re-read the article/blog to debug my interpretation.

The problem was I didn't read the last 2 sections, of which he clearly talks about what he learned. Thus I scientifically conclude this is not some weird hipster-ish ironic post of which maybe I'm the only one in the world who misread it that way.

Maybe one day someone can make a machine learning based hipster irony or post irony detection browser plugin so I don't have to think about it.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#28

Post by fein »

jakobe wrote: post #17

That's why I still use vanilla PHP & Postgres for web projects. I don't use any hot new technologies, I don't use frameworks, I don't do unit testing. I try to use as little client side JS as possible. Whenever possible, I use static HTML. The advantage is that I can create a working prototype in days. I can show something to the client very early, and I don't spend months to fulfill specifications the client didn't…

I took the same approach for a while up until I started rolling my own framework to speed things up. Now I just stick to Yii + postgres. Backend gets developed first with Yii's code gen tools, then the sexy ajax fun gets put into the clientside and the auto genned CRUD code gets extended to pass any additional fields I need back to the client.

Yii's CRUD code gen is incredibly nice to work with off the bat, so it really comes down to customizing json form validation messages and packing some partials views in with the response.

edit: It has ended up being that a good 70% of my time in web app dev is devoted to the tedium of changing little UI crap (Can this blue pop a little more? Can you put some shadowing here? I like this slider but I'm not feeling hyped about it... repeat ad infinitum), and not so much with complex backend work. It takes about two days, as you said, to get the server code going strong, and then two weeks to move divs around by an em here or there.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#29

Post by dasil003 »

Sounds like you learned a lot. The only problem here is the lack of shipping—that is what made you feel like a failure. Psychologically it would have been better to have finished a crappy v1 then do a rewrite in a new language for v2, but in practice you probably learned an equal amount this way, so cut yourself some slack.

And remember, being a perfectionist is a prerequisite for being good at anything. If you aren't self-critical you won't improve, and no one comes out of the gate being good at anything. Obviously that's necessary but not sufficient since many people are disheartened by their early incompetence and give up before they've even really gotten started, but it's not a bad thing.

Re: I’m young, inexperienced and a perfectionist

#30

Post by merlincorey »

jakobe wrote: post #17

That's why I still use vanilla PHP & Postgres for web projects. I don't use any hot new technologies, I don't use frameworks, I don't do unit testing. I try to use as little client side JS as possible. Whenever possible, I use static HTML. The advantage is that I can create a working prototype in days. I can show something to the client very early, and I don't spend months to fulfill specifications the client didn't…

I prefer microframeworks like Flask, because I can get prototypes up in hours that incrementally become what it's supposed to be, scaling well to a large complicated application with deployments, unit tests, and documentation.
Post reply on HN