At the start of my career I was being paid for the code I wrote. By the end of my career I was being paid for the code I didn't have to write. One of the nicest complements I ever got from a coworker was that he was astonished how much I accomplished with so little code. Everything I built was designed to be easily and quickly extensible with minimal changes, I planned my structure for future needs. That is why high…
Right. The big misconception is that really good programmers just write code at 10x the speed of bad ones. Nope, the complete opposite in fact.
“Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
451–460 of 590 posts
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#452Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#453I believe there are some programming jobs in which the code is absolutely the easier part. Not all of us work in signal processing, integrated systems or have to push upstream to Linux kernel because the company we work for really needs a memory allocation optimization for its data centers. Navigating customer requirements and building something that satisfies both market's needs and company strategy can be an incred…
Then I tried in iMovie. I tried importing the raw gifs. It would hang everytime and I had to restart it. So I had to export .mov directly from Gifox.
It worked great on iMovie, until I needed to speed up or slow down some clips. I noticed on the first operation, it would spin for about 3s, on the second, 5s, on the third, 10s, and by the 6th operation it would either spin for 1min or not stop at all. The machine started getting flow, iMovie was using 22.4gb of my 36gb machine. Had to also force quit iMovie several times. A task that should have taken 30-60min tops, took 5h.
Memory was definitely leaking somewhere, and in different application with completely different engineering budgets. The product was there, people were paying for it, the software was not delivering, which means it was costing customers time and money, meaning people were overpaying for it. This is not a thing product can solve. Programming is absolutelly the hardest part sometimes.
You could say throw more AI at it, and MSFT tried, how's that going for them with all the weird product decisions and bugs and apologies?
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#454lol, I hope most coders are not this jaded.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#455Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#456Too many people on hacker news sound like blacksmiths at the beginning of the industrial revolution. Get with the times, artisanal handwritten code is worthless
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#457Coding is the act of translating an algorithm or system design into a specific programming language/framework/libraries domain. That part was never the hard part as it was mostly about learning the syntax/conventions etc of that stack and then doing the translation. The hard part is about coming up with righ algorithms and system design for your particular software and evoling that over time without breaking it (the…
Everything is hard until you’ve done it at least once. Making shit work is hard (excluding cases when your particular task has been solved and shared with you)
If it was that easy I would never miss my ETAs.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#458Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but many details Which part of my list was just "a detail" to be dealt with at some point in the lifecycle (but only if you're not too busy shipping features) for you? You're laying bricks before knowing if the wall's supposed to be concrete. > Code is a form of low-level design and is where the rubber hits the road. Sure but in keeping with your analogy tires are fungible across most cars and it takes minutes to c…
No part of your list was just a detail, but all parts of the list consist of essential properties and details. As I said, many of those details will fall into place when one starts implementing the core architecture. It also matters a lot what scale one is operating at. Bigger scale will require more effort up front, PoCs, several big iterations, etc. To give a smaller scale example, I defined a general simple protoc…
This is only true for newbies.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#459Earlier quoted context omitted.
No they can’t do everything before writing a line of code. The design and requirements feed into the code and vice-versa over and over through the lifecycle of a piece of software. Some architecture work and design will be done beforehand, but many details will fall into place as the code is being written, thrown away, adapted, etc. The idea that code is mere transcription - which I see a lot in these AI discussions…
How does not everyone understand this? It's why waterfall development never worked.
I have used waterfall for decades to ship millions of dollars worth of software. If you don't want it to work it won't work.
Re: “Code was never the hard part” is an insult to all programmers
#460Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've really seen a web software product die because of performance issues?
The $32M Hertz scandal The $480M bug that killed a trading company in 12 secs Challenger Probably a bunch of stories from healthcare