If you deep dive into any subject head first, all in, you tend to get pretty decent at it but you have to have passion and grit to do that and not everyone does. There are some people with exceptional intellect but those types are very rare so being good is achievable for most of us but being Elon or Carmack or Hassabis isn't.
How do I know if I'm good at programming?
61–70 of 153 posts
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#62Satoshi Nakamoto was a good programmer. He influenced the world by speaking through code.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#63I think the question "how do I know if I'm good at programming?" is a non-helpful question if the ultimate goal is introspection or diagnosing professional development. Any mentor who hears such a question should absolutely take the time to get the asker to pull back and re-think what they're really asking, rather than dive-in and start giving specific pseudo-objective advice about "code".
First, it is far too broad. What does "good" mean? Good enough? The opposite of bad? Compared to whom? And even "programming" is a ridiculously vague thing-- everyone who has worked even a year in the SW development profession will know that programming is only part of the job and that there are many different roles, many different kinds of skills.
Next, what is the intent of even asking that question? What can one do with "the answer"?
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#64>Identify the knowledge you lack and seek out the most relevant resource That can be difficult on the Web. When learning electronics searching the Web for help quickly showed how useless it is. There were many explanations but no teaching and often the explanation begun at a level too far past the level of the question asked. My guess is well over 95% of explanations I saw were just people posturing to show off their…
> When learning electronics searching the Web for help quickly showed how useless it is
Not just electronics. When you're dealing with any kind of non-trivial problem, searching for help with sensible solutions from internet is an exercise in frustration and futility. The answers, when you find any, tend to be out of date, ill-informed or just flat out wrong. Often all three at the same time.
Simply put: most of the technical information on the internet is written by helpful idiots.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#65A programmer who thinks that they are good at programming is almost certainly mistaken. A programmer who thinks that they are bad at programming is almost certainly correct. On a team, one of these people is more dangerous than the other. Knowing which is the greatest wisdom.
What is the meaning of programming?
Vast emptiness, nothing holy.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#66There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…
While I appreciate you sharing, I have to say that I believe this is extremely non-representative of the industry. I've work on a lot of teams across the years and have seems different people with each of those individual qualities, but have never seen any common split of people into those two combinations.
I feel this may be too specific to your personal experience / work history.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#67There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…
I don't know if I agree. I have friends that can smash out amazing code in very little time. Looking through some repositories of programs I like, some of them were prototyped in very little time, but with a surprisingly excellent first revision. I had the pleasure to work with Zed Shaw quite some time ago, and even though his code might not be perfect, he writes a lot better code than the vast majority, in a lot les…
Yeah this was my thought too. He described the two types of Junior or intermediate programmer but there's a third type that writes great software extremely fast. I've worked with them before.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#68There are 2 types of “good” programmers, who both think the other type is useless. The first is the “rockstar” developer type who is great at prototyping, hitting deadlines no matter what and delivering functionality, albeit full of bugs. They will write 80% of the code and will drive the support team up the wall by breaking the build, causing customer issues in production, security holes and basically seriously degr…
I don't know if I agree. I have friends that can smash out amazing code in very little time. Looking through some repositories of programs I like, some of them were prototyped in very little time, but with a surprisingly excellent first revision. I had the pleasure to work with Zed Shaw quite some time ago, and even though his code might not be perfect, he writes a lot better code than the vast majority, in a lot les…
Yeah this was my thought too. He described the two types of Junior or intermediate programmer but there's a third type that writes great software extremely fast. I've worked with them before.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#69One way of many: if your applications work and are reliable, your clients are happy and you're getting paid, you are a good programmer.
Re: How do I know if I'm good at programming?
#70Depends how you define good. Some define good as getting the job done in a quick and efficient manner and making the client (or company) happy with the result, however code quality may suffer in this instance and it could be hard to maintain. Others define good as writing the highest quality code with high test coverage, deployment procedures, writing detailed JIRA tickets, great documentation, training other develop…
Deliverables is misleading. Would you rather a deliverable full of bugs that can't scale but is delivered 'on time'?