I had written a simple Clients -> Orders -> Invocies - Payment collection managing software for my company in 1998. It is still being used in 2024! I am humbled every time I see our team using it.
Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
281–290 of 704 posts
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#282Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a good friend of mine often says: We work in a field of people who envision themselves as artists, when all that is wanted are painters.
No one wants to be a "programmer." They'd rather be called "engineers." With none of the licensure, mandatory education, and so forth. But the world needs programmers and technicians for most of the work we have to do. I do comparably little "engineering" and the little I have done that qualifies for such a statement I recall. Majority of the work is programming and technician work. Nothing wrong with that.
Actually I call myself a developer. I'm not that good of a programmer, but quite resourceful as a developer.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#283I lived in Pamplona, Spain for a year, back before my Spanish was particularly good. It was a pretty amazing place, with all its narrow cobbled alleys and small shops. They had a particular style of bread in a few of the shops, kind of a rustic baguette with pointy ends, that I never could find the name of. I'd always have to point and say "that one", which always felt awkward. Worse, my Spanish wasn't yet good enoug…
Hola querido. The Spanish word for bread is Pan, not Pain. Pain is French :)
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#284Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#285Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a false dichotomy. On one end, you have "overarchitects everything so much that the code is soon unmaintainable" and on the other end you have "architects the code so little that the code is soon unmaintainable". Always write the simplest thing you can, but no simpler. Finding that line is where all the art is.
It's cliche, but I really do feel reading the Art of Unix Programming gave me a very good sense early on for how to walk this line carefully. Unix programs are high quality - but they're also, ideally, small , and written with an eye to compositionality with the rest of the ecosystem. The best architecture is in the middle, and often the best first draft is a simple series of pipes. https://www.catb.org/~esr/writings…
(Honest question)
What is the difference between this microservice architecture that gets a lot of hate here?
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#286It's a longer story, but the gist is that one night I got a call saying some code I'd written wasn’t working properly, and they wanted me to come and fix it. When I tried to refuse, I was told they would send someone to break down my door and drag me, kicking and screaming, to fix it. The threat was very real. This was an important lesson for me: you should always be ready to take responsibility for what you write.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#287Using Unix (AIX) AWK and ksh scripts I had written to process a ton of source code to simplify the code. Only I used pipes. And large files were writing back to themselves while the head was still being read. End result was quite a lot of the larger programs were mangled. Had to restore from backup and some of my best teamies lost 2 weeks of work. And I looked like an idiot for not understanding pipes.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#288In 1993 I was interviewed for an operating job in a power plant for a major airline, assigned to their data center. At my current job, I was working in a high rise office building with sixty-six floors. The operating system computer was a JC8520, which was running a version of MS-DOS. All commands had to be typed in correctly or nothing would happen. While operating the plant, several commands had to be entered every…
Very funny.
Did you ever bring it up with those people?
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#289Using Unix (AIX) AWK and ksh scripts I had written to process a ton of source code to simplify the code. Only I used pipes. And large files were writing back to themselves while the head was still being read. End result was quite a lot of the larger programs were mangled. Had to restore from backup and some of my best teamies lost 2 weeks of work. And I looked like an idiot for not understanding pipes.
Yet I ask sysadmins today if they would be okay if installing more modern shells on production machines so programmers can deploy scripts using them, and they say no.
Re: Ask HN: What was your most humbling learning moment?
#290It's a longer story, but the gist is that one night I got a call saying some code I'd written wasn’t working properly, and they wanted me to come and fix it. When I tried to refuse, I was told they would send someone to break down my door and drag me, kicking and screaming, to fix it. The threat was very real. This was an important lesson for me: you should always be ready to take responsibility for what you write.
I guess I'm interested in hearing why you think your employer would actually break your door and drag you to fix a bug. Was it a mafia organisation or something?