261–270 of 745 posts
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Software is whatever you want it to be. I can write software that is not for other humans. That's the most fun part of software engineering to me, when you don't care about the users and just do it just for the fun of doing it.
Don't forget to write for future you . They'd appreciate some consideration as well. Mostly along the lines of "wtf does this module do?"
Amazingly, I agree with every single point. >> Nobody asks “why” enough This point is the most important IMO. It's so common for people to do things without asking themselves why they're doing it. Every line of code should fulfill a clear purpose. You want to avoid writing code which is difficult to explain to a non-technical person. >> People don’t really want innovation... If you believe in what you’re doing, and k…
Mmm, in my experience, it’s more that people don’t believe that something truly valuable to them comes packaged in your arrogance, brilliance, or effortlessness. They’re so accustomed to those things being signs of assholes, or reasons to feel inadequate, that they resist looking at what’s being delivered. The OP’s point about bracing for a long battle means that truly persuading others is not just about making the a…
Imagine constantly improving yourself for 15 years, then after 15 years, everyone you work with only gives you positive feedback and everyone wants to be on your team. You even launch open source projects which get thousands of stars on GitHub... You know you're good because there is no other explanation and nobody helped you and you have 0 meaningful industry connections and come from a modest background... but somehow you struggle to even land a first technical interview at a big tech corporation in spite of having the required university degree. That's my situation, so forgive me if I sound like an asshole on this anonymous website where I can finally vent my frustration.
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I do a lot of dev work with non-profits and such. About a year ago I was working on an extremely difficult project as a volunteer where I was insistent that a specific part was vitally important to getting the project to move forward (generalizing tables extraction from scanned OCR docs) and I was spending a lot of time on it. One of the devs I worked with, with 40+ years of experience, basically told me this exact t…
Make an API out of that. There is huge demand for it.
It's harder than you think: The name of the game is to avoid fooling yourself and you're the easiest person to fool (that's from Feynman). If the problem seems hard it probably is harder than you think. Be ruthless and don't settle for unsatisfactory, hand-waving solutions to these problems. Most people can't detect deadlocks or temporal properties of concurrent programs in their heads.
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That's a useless advice IMO. How can you not assuming anything. I assume that my CPU works, for example. You can't write useful programs without many assumptions. Imagine program that does not assume that CPU works and reruns every algorithm few times with few different code versions to verify that outputs match. It might make sense for moon mission, but definitely not for another CRUD app. I don't have 20 years of e…
I completely agree with your second paragraph but the last sentence seems like you don't know what people mean when they say they hate NullPointerExceptions. They don't mean that you just silently ignore the null value, they mean that they would prefer to use a language that has proper optional types.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do a lot of dev work with non-profits and such. About a year ago I was working on an extremely difficult project as a volunteer where I was insistent that a specific part was vitally important to getting the project to move forward (generalizing tables extraction from scanned OCR docs) and I was spending a lot of time on it. One of the devs I worked with, with 40+ years of experience, basically told me this exact t…
Make an API out of that. There is huge demand for it.
Went to a presentation at a Golang meetup in Amsterdam by the guys behind this company. Seemed to know their stuff. But I have no real world experience using it.
> I’d rather someone give me opinions that I violently disagree with than for them to have no opinions at all. I've been a developer for 15 years... anybody else feel like the further they get into their career, the more they want to keep their opinions to themselves? I feel like as a junior dev I had way stronger opinions and I was a lot more vocal about them. Now, I still have opinions, but I've learned that nobody…
After couple of years people realize that just having opinion and being vocal about it does not make one a Senior/Manager/Leader. There is much more to it and one learns about it on the job.
Incredibly high performers exist, but are rare.
For example, the following quote is from a talk given by Gabe Newell.
(Unfortunately, I do not have the URL to the source video for this quote.)
“At IBM in the 1980s, typical productivity would be 1,000 debugged, shipped lines of code per year. That was the metric that they used for their median employee. Where as, when we were shipping Half Life 1, one employee, Yahn Bernier, was shipping 4,000 lines of code per day.”
40+ years of experience here, and I'll tell you the #1 thing I've learned: * Software is a social service. Its for other humans. Incredibly, it doesn't matter how educated the developer, they still seem to have to learn this lesson themselves, over and over, until it sinks in...
* If coders could write useful documentation (starting w/inline comments) they probably wouldn't be coders.This is a very insightful list. But there is one thing I'd quibble with: while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist. Both in the "can support a company by themselves" sense and the "mad lone genius" sense. Not all the 10x programmers are good at working with other people or on other people's ideas. 0.1x programmers are often lost or afraid, although they may just be uni…
> while it's inherently a super-subjective metric, I would say that 10x programmers do exist Even worse than super-subjective, it seems like people don't agree on the definition of "10x programmer". Is that 10x value (code * code quality) produced per unit of work-time? Per brain cycle? Are you controlling for programmer experience, or domain knowledge, as [1] pointed out? Do you actually mean 10x, or is that a stand…
I see it as more of a compliment. Nobody should be seriously and unironically calling themselves a 10x programmer, it should be bestowed by other people.