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A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

blog.freecodecamp.com

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Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#41

Post by drcomputer »

austenallred wrote: post #29
edw519 wrote: post #21

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, go…

It's tough when you're reading HackerNews or spend a lot of time around technical people. Technical people are, necessarily, very adamant about the technologies they use. When you're first starting out, you just want the "best." Among the most common misunderstandings for non-technical people is what a programming "language" is. You don't realize that almost all programming languages are made up of very similar const…

I think it's possible to have preferences without resorting to ad hominem. Sometimes it seems that just having a preference is enough to associate you with the assholes. The truth is, every group of every thing has assholes, or groups of people that perceive assholes. Every group has people that have preference, and people that don't. Every group has people that have opinions, and may voice those opinions with certainty when they actually have no certainty, and are aware of this, but don't know how to communicate it without creating logical paradoxes.

The people elements of communication are not easy to parse correctly. You can never truly know how other people think, you can only assume based on experience collected a priori, which may be all together constructed on a false premise that intialized the pattern of thought construction.

I wish I had known the things I know now, 15 years ago. But I don't. That's part of living. We learn and grow because of our experiences. It can't be learned in any other way.

Personally, I just ignore assholes, or if I choose to engage, I learn to play their own game. Then I typically stop judging them.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#42

Post by cranklin »

The problem is that crash-course developers are too satisfied with just making something work and most online tutorials are focused on language syntax. If you're learning to code, great for you... but I'd be scared to be part of your team, maintaining your code.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#43

Post by pnathan »

edw519 wrote: post #21

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, go…

+1 I strongly believe that we're a profession and should have professional standards.

On the other hand, I do suggest you look at hobbyist/quasi-professional magazines. It's.... not terribly dissimilar.

Example cover: http://popularwoodworking.woodworkingplansplans.com/images/w...

Conceptually, that's the same exact approach taken..

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#44

Post by cylinder »

How did you land job interviews after being self-taught? I'm doing the same right now, but I assume I need to complete some sort of bootcamp or what not in order to actually land an entry level job as a web developer. How do you get noticed when you don't have formal experience?

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#45

Post by Mvandenbergh »

edw519 wrote: post #21

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, go…

The moment that a student dentist starts to drill into a tooth to place a filling (under close expert supervision and after a lot of training) for the first time they are doing two things: 1) Removing enamel that will never grow back - if they do it wrong, there is no option to fix a semi-colon and recompile 2) Doing it on a human mouth for the very first time in their lives.

The difference isn't just that most programmers don't directly have others physical health in their hands, although that is true. Some programmers do, but all dentists do.

The difference is that you don't get do-overs. Have you ever written code that didn't even compile the first time? Or code that failed a test, or code that did something wrong in a test environment, or code that did something buggy in production?

If you'd made a mistake like that as a dentist, a patient might well have lost a tooth that they're never getting back. Much worse could happen, you could cause someone to lose feeling to their face, even kill someone.

There isn't any low-stakes dentistry but there is low-stakes programming. That makes it easier to start as an entry-level programmer because even at a low level of skill and experience you can potentially do useful work for someone.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#47

Post by civilian »

AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #8

Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...

For certain definitions of "should", sure. Like: I _should_ get some exercise tomorrow. I should take out the trash today instead of tomorrow. A very optional should.

I've got 4 years of professional software experience and the only C I've written is a couple hours on an Arduino device. It's just not that needed or relevant to my work as a web developer. I don't think the article is too focused on web dev, that is where the self-taught developers can most easily insert themselves.

FWIW, dynamic scripting language is redundant.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#48

Post by thomyorkie »

jng wrote: post #32
edw519 wrote: post #21

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, go…

Because one finds many self-taught developers out there who can outperform college-educated compsci majors day in and day out. Because one can read universally-acknowledged figures explaining how a large number of people with a software engineering degree can't code their way out of a paper bag or pass the most basic "fizz buzz test". (1) Because we can see non-genius 17-year-olds writing apps that are bought by top…

Software engineering is a relatively young field. However, to say we don't properly understand the fundamentals is absurd.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#49

Post by worklogin »

edw519 wrote: post #21

A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Fix Teeth. My own. How a reasonably balanced individual nearly went insane I was just a guy in a suit in an office with a vague healthcare idea. Then I decided to learn to fix teeth. I overheard some guy at a happy hour bragging about how easily he was able to automate his overbite by using a technique called "4 Handed Dentristry". I thought, "huh, 4 Handed Dentistry." I went home, go…

This analogy is as absurd and oversimplified as comparing grand theft auto to a download of Taylor Swift albums.

There is no such thing as "freelance amateur dentistry". You can't start tinkering with teeth and get a job the way you can tinker with programs as a hobby before getting a junior position at a programming gig. To compare the two professions and suggest the path to engagement and skill are the same is obtuse.

This article resonated with me more than most HN pieces, because it describes my path as well. I've not had professional guidance, and with the absolute flood of options, of data, of debates and educational material, it's REALLY difficult to know where to start. I don't understand how you find it acceptable to mock someone's interest and lack of guidance.

Re: A Cautionary Tale of Learning to Code

#50

Post by jtchang »

BonsaiDen wrote: post #13
AlexanderDhoore wrote: post #8

Very very good article, although the latter part is a bit too focussed on web dev and dynamic scripting languages. I personally think every programmer should know some C. Basic things like what the stack and the heap are. Edit: Ok, probably not in the case of absolute beginners, but after a year or two...

There are a whole lot of things every programmer should know because they'll have a profound impact on their code no matter how far up they sit in the abstraction chain. Even things like memory alignment and cache lines can bite you really badly if you don't know about them and order your loop the wrong way around :) Date and Time Handling, Unicode and Data Structures are also a common area for many misconceptions an…

Do you mind going into memory alignment and cache lines and what would be good to know? I feel like I ignore most of that unless I am coding in C. I mostly do python or Javascript so does that stuff mater when you are that high up in the tech stack?
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