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The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

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Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#51

Post by galbar »

erulabs wrote: post #42

Software engineers, I love yall. To see the light at the end of the tunnel. To see some glorious perfect paradigm that maybe could be. I envy you. I grew up in a datacenter. Leaky air conditioners and diesel generators. Open the big doors if it gets too hot. Now let’s go back. Back to when we didn’t know better. Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Everything, eve…

I have said many times to teammates: the only code that is perfect is the one that hasn't left our minds. The moment it's written down it becomes flawed and imperfect.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to make it as good as we can, but rather that we must accept that the outcome will be flawed and that, despite our best intentions, it will show its sharp edges the next time we come to work on it.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#52

Post by PixelForg »

Hopefully the future me is able to relate to this, because I really feel like I'm in a rut when it comes to working on personal projects.

I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages, yet I just can't sit and go through the documentation every day like I should. Still haven't finished the rust book.

The other way is start building already, and if you come across a block, then learn about that thing and move on, but I feel uncomfortable having gaps in my knowledge, AI exists but I don't want to use it to generate code for me because I wanna enjoy the process of writing code rather than just reviewing code.

Basically I'm just stuck within the constraints I put for myself :(, I'm not sure why I wrote this here, probably just wanted to let it out..

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#53

Post by Cthulhu_ »

mgaunard wrote: post #31

Letting go means stopping to care. That's a slippery slope to coasting.

Letting go of everything means stopping to care about anything, sure. But the point of the article is to try and stop caring about everything and focus on the things that are really important to you, focus on the things you can change.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#54

Post by Cthulhu_ »

arjvik wrote: post #22

These days, knowing that instead of spending hours artfully crafting a solution to something, GPT could code up a far-less-elegant-but-still-working solution in about 5-10 minutes of prompting has all but solved this.

Yeah but if you let go of your years of coding standards / best practices and just hack something together yourself, it won't be much slower than chatgpt.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#55

Post by Cthulhu_ »

dmichulke wrote: post #16

Wow, great piece. We are playing software factorio and the winning move is not to play.

Don't start, I've started a playthrough again with the new expansion and just landed on the first planet after overbuilding my home base with grids and trains and stuff.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#56

Post by kmanraj »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #40
d4rkn0d3z wrote: post #24

I think about this from the perpective of change management. Every defect I hope to fix entails a change, which has a certain probability of creating another irksome deficiency or incompatibility. When building complex systems I try to design them with the end state, that you describe very well, in mind. Each time you set about to make a single change ask what is the probability (p) that this change results in anothe…

Does this help explain why any simple household activity has a frustrating ~50% chance of turning into a string of dependencies and dependents that make you spend 10x the time you expected on it all? E.g. you figure it'll take a minute to take the trash out and wash your hands. But on the way you discover you run out of trash bags, and while washing your hands you run out of soap, then as you pick the refill bottle f…

What you've described is called "yak shaving", which is a series of neverending tasks that must be completed in order to complete the original task. It's apty named since shaving a hairy yak is a neverending task.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#57

Post by Cthulhu_ »

ajuc wrote: post #21

Great article. I know it's not the main subject, but I really liked this part: > Technical Work as Emotional Regulation Men are taught to do that in most societies. You are unhappy - don't bother talking about it (men don't cry), do sth for the society - you'll receive praise in return and your pain will go away for a while. Even if nobody'll praise you - you'll think better of yourself. Same thing that makes our fat…

To expand, code is a means, the core "habits" that programmers develop (at least speaking for myself) is twofold; abstracting, trying to reduce things to simple stereotypes; codifying / decision-tree-ing interactions, things like that. And problem solving, when someone mentions an issue, the gut reaction is to try and fix it. And it takes a lot of internet wisdoms and/or therapy to learn that you are allowed to let people stew in their problems, or that unless you're asked for a solution you don't need to offer one.

Problem solving is easier than listening and empathy.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#59

Post by throw_away_0613 »

As I'm getting older, I want things to be as standardized as possible, and just don't worry about the details. I have learned from my mistakes

The script I made for deployment, because existing solutions didn't "feel" right, required a lot of work and maintenance when we later had to add features and bug fixes.

Another script I made for building and deploying Java applications, because I didn't like Maven and Puppet.

The micro service I rewrote because I wanted to use my own favourite programming language. I introduced a lot of bugs that were already fixed, missing features and another language for my co-workers to learn when they inherited the application when I left.

Re: The curse of knowing how, or; fixing everything

#60

Post by tpoacher »

PixelForg wrote: post #52

Hopefully the future me is able to relate to this, because I really feel like I'm in a rut when it comes to working on personal projects. I have many ideas that I want to build, but I'd have to learn new languages, yet I just can't sit and go through the documentation every day like I should. Still haven't finished the rust book. The other way is start building already, and if you come across a block, then learn abou…

You are not alone. I feel the same way.
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