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Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

michaelbromley.co.uk

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Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#51

Post by hippich »

I find his experience is very fulfilling. In the beginning he had fun times doing stuff which actually delivered some results. Probably gradually became aware of wrong chooses he made and discovered architect side of coding... I kinda feel this is a way to learn it. I think you need this excitement of fast moving to keep engaged - it is hacker part of coding. When you are young it is okey to try something, may be break something and move on.

... Or may be I think like that only because I can see myself almost in every single line author posted :)

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#53

Post by einhverfr »

agentultra wrote: post #47
einhverfr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to sound like an old fogie here (I am almost 40) but one thing that occurs to me is that as we age our thinking changes and all the things you mention often develop over time. When you are 20 you are pretty much at the height of your mathematical abilities. This is fine for certain kinds of programming, but it is not really ideal for others. It ensures that algorithms primary and the domains in a real sense be…

> When you are 20 you are pretty much at the height of your mathematical abilities. Is that really true? There are many examples of people who came to mathematics late in life and did good things: http://mathoverflow.net/questions/3591/mathematicians-who-we... I think you only get better with time if you keep yourself sharp. What has changed for me is that I can't sit still and pound back Redbulls for six-hour coding…

And also see this: http://www.massey.ac.nz/~rmclachl/overthehill.html

However, I wonder if there is something else going on here. What I noticed in the list (and in the article I am linking to) is that the early peak seems less obvious from a historiography perspective than it does from a contemporary perspective. So I can't help but wonder if there is a qualitative difference in the sorts of contributions that younger and older mathematicians make.

Thinking more in terms of fluid vs crystalized intelligence here, but wondering if there is something else. I know my fluid intelligence is not where it was ten years ago, but part of that is a greater understanding of the problem domain. I can see more possibilities, and I see different ones than I would have before.

So I don't think it is as simple as we might want to think but I do think that thinking patterns (and abilities) change qualitatively as we age in ways which are favorable for important contributions when viewed through the light of history. Whether a thesis review board would agree is a different matter.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#54

Post by habosa »

This article did an excellent job verbalizing the incredible feeling of mental potency one gets when learning to program. When you see that first "Hello, World!", you are hooked. I still get this feeling whenever I learn a new platform. When I learned Android I was amazed that I had made a real-life app run on my phone. When I learned Ruby on Rails I proudly stuck my flag in the surface of the internet and declared myself ruler of my domain (pun intentded). When I learned to program an Arduino I felt my code-laden tendrils inching out into the real world: that light is blinking because I demanded it do so!

This is why i'd like to teach programming to kids. I really don't care if they continue with it or ever learn how to do anything useful, I just want to expose everyone to that feeling of power you can get when you're behind a keyboard and in front of the right tools. It makes you think you can do something amazing, and everyone should have a chance to feel that.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#55

Post by slewis »

mason55 wrote: post #39
esonderegger wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's worked for you all for making the leap from lone programmer to working on a team with a mentor/people who are smarter than you? I ask this as someone somewhere between "beginner" and "intermediate". I've used git on a bunch of projects, but normally get hung up with branches or with trying to undo changes. Even harder than version control, I think, is getting a lone beginner programmer to write tests. When I'm…

> When time is a limiting factor, it's hard to get from "I know I should be doing this" to actually doing this. If you don't have time to write tests then you've overscoped the features for the available time. Once you start treating testing as essential and budgeting a realistic amount of time to write test code (probably on the order of 1:1 feature code time:test code time) then you'll be able to get it done. Your…

I agree with your point that it might be worth paring back features to improve code quality.

But there is no one true code to test ratio. If you're trying to become a better programmer be wary of dogma.

As posted here the other day, airbnb didn't have much testing until a year ago: http://nerds.airbnb.com/testing-at-airbnb/

I'm not saying either way is right or wrong, which is kind of my point.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#56

Post by lugg »

mml wrote: post #42
lugg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're not referring to http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN Those 100 line functions wouldn't make it through any half decent code review. Zero modularization, dal is inextricably linked to almost every piece of logic in the thing. Its an object called "Bitcoin" and I have a feeling it is 95% of mt gox' business logic if not all of it, it even writes raw xml to a temp pointer before dumping it into a cache and then m…

I once was hired to a gig because of the following words that came out of my face hole: "Some people see a giant hairball of code, and think to themselves 'I don't want to deal with that'. I see the same code and think 'I'm going to get a new boat'." Bad, evil, horrible code written by misguided children makes the world go around.

Pretty much my job description.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#57

Post by DougWebb »

esonderegger wrote: post #40
mason55 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When time is a limiting factor, it's hard to get from "I know I should be doing this" to actually doing this. If you don't have time to write tests then you've overscoped the features for the available time. Once you start treating testing as essential and budgeting a realistic amount of time to write test code (probably on the order of 1:1 feature code time:test code time) then you'll be able to get it done. Your…

I'm sure I'm not the only one who got down the road to overscoped features by saying "gee, wouldn't it be cool if my users could access this info that's living in a mysql table" and threw something together with a little php mysql_query(SELECT...), and it worked! except for some edge cases with non-ascii characters and the fact that you knew you were opening yourself up to SQL injection attacks, but you weren't reall…

Sorry, that was a long way of pointing out that us novice programmers often don't have good methods of determining how long something should take because we've never done it before.

That is basically the core difficulty in software estimation: none of us have good methods for determining how long something should take because most of the time we haven't done it before. If it had been done before in a way we can reuse, we'd reuse it. The meat of most projects is always something that's in some way new, even when the new bit is integrating a bunch of pre-existing parts in a new way.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#59

Post by einhverfr »

farinasa wrote: post #34
lugg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you're not referring to http://pastebin.com/W8B3CGiN Those 100 line functions wouldn't make it through any half decent code review. Zero modularization, dal is inextricably linked to almost every piece of logic in the thing. Its an object called "Bitcoin" and I have a feeling it is 95% of mt gox' business logic if not all of it, it even writes raw xml to a temp pointer before dumping it into a cache and then m…

I personally like the hard coded values and the extremely long line lengths.

That was my first thought too.

That and "this looks kind of structured from the top but the more I look at it, the less structured it becomes."

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#60

Post by ebiester »

noonespecial wrote: post #30
joeld42 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

write more code. regret it.

The scariest place to be as a programmer is when you look back at what you did 6 months ago and still think to yourself that its pretty good. A little regret is a good, good thing.

It still amazes me that I'm still getting better as a programmer every day, over ten years later.

Unfortunately, I repeated the same year of experience in the middle a few times...

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