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

What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–34 of 34 posts

Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

#31

Post by _8j50 »

scotty79 wrote: post #28
_8j50 wrote: post #4

So long as they support and maintain their own code and accept responsibility for it.

If the software does the right thing for the person or organisation then it's time for the pros to come in and rewrite it all pretty and snappy. Discovering of what software should do is like half of the development. I don't mind it being written by the people who are closer to the matter at hand.

I disagree, maybe they want it to do more but they don't know it is possible. Heck, I can code just fine but some problems I need to ask a proper software dev if they know the right algorithm/ datastructure,etc... to make it possible. And don't even get me started with security issues that arise when people are hard coding creds and screwing up permissions on prod data.

Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

#32

Post by uejfiweun »

QuercusMax wrote: post #30
uejfiweun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, thanks for the information. So it seems bootcamps are not really the same type of quality signal that you would get from a degree and GPA. This assuages my fears somewhat. As an aside, I always considered git to be in the category of "Easily Google-able Technologies". In that whatever I am trying to do in git, it is generally very easy to find a resource online that tells me exactly what to do. For this…

You should learn the basics of the git object model. It's really very simple and can help you understand better what some of the commands are actually doing. Lots of git stuff is just stored as plain text file inside the .git folder - the magic 'HEAD' ref is just a textfile that contains the hash of the HEAD commit. http://shafiul.github.io/gitbook/1_the_git_object_model.html

Wow, this is really awesome. Thanks for the resource! Stuff like this is why I love HN.

Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

#33

Post by al2o3cr » 

     The interface may look cluttered: the landing
     page jams in 150 buttons and a local-news ticker
Apps like this aren't new - huge chunks of the business world have been running on Visual Basic / Delphi / etc monstrosities with the same design sensibility for decades.

Re: What if all workers wrote software, not just the geek elite?

#34

Post by oriori »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #11

I think the next big thing in software is going to be that almost every office worker will start writing basic software. Maybe in a python like language. People spend a lot of time and effort to do simple repetitive stuff that anybody can do with a 10 line python script. They don't do it because nobody has told them it's that easy. 30-40 years ago, an average office worker wouldn't use a word processor for typing out…

At my current work I use linux and bash to rename files, filter csv data, and basic summary statistics why? one day I asked a colleague of mine to count the number of occurrences of a persons name in a google sheet...watched him count using his mouse.

I'd like for people to get to python levels of coding no matter how light, but baby steps first.

Post reply on HN