Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#71

Post by mst » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 6:59 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #67

> Yesterday was for me like disaster. I worked until 22 o'clock, (I had to stop at 17 o'clock) to find out that I'm running a microservice in a Docker Container and the changes I made on a mail template had no effect, when I send them, since I was working on local files. I am a senior IT architect with 10+ years of industry experience. Just this Friday, I was debugging an issue in a Docker image together with a colle…

"Reading the documentation end to end" is a superpower.

Some documentation is a bit large for this, but less than you think because it gets faster with practice.

I'd also mention "don't be afraid to source dive on OSS stuff", you'll be slow at first but being able to jump into other's people code and mentally reverse engineer their intent/architecture grows with time and is also a superpower.

(to the point where I often read the code first then check the docs and/or the tests to see if what I plan to do is explicitly supported or just incidentally going to work)

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#72

Post by mst » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 7:01 PM UTC

eveningtree wrote: post #38

Allow me to give you an internal perspective: Web development is hard. The individual parts are manageable, but bringing them together is a mess. We web developers are aware of this. It's like an open secret. And it takes time getting comfortable with the mess, and letting the brain develop its own map of how things work. And you will do stupid mistakes along the way. Those are funny actually. I'll give you my curren…

I've suffered from "are you connecting to the right database" enough times that I can often psychic debug that problem for others given a couple of lines.

Make a mistake enough times and you start to be able to smell it.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#73

Post by mst » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 7:03 PM UTC

abraxas wrote: post #52

The cognitive overhead for coding web apps in a modern enterprise environment is enormous. It tends to be a big pile of spaghetti where the hipsters changed the noodles to the RPC flavour and called it "microservices". Most times it's poorly documented, haphazard and impossible to test without connecting to the whole zoo of service dependencies. It's not you, it's them. If you want to do web dev you'll have to put up…

I feel like this is a "you are not google" shaped problem. Even most Fortune 500 companies aren't.

Re: Ask HN: Am I incompotent for web development?

#74

Post by mst » Mon, Jul 04, 2022, 7:04 PM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #31

randomtwiddler wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm very senior these days. Most of my job appears to be unsticking people. But even I get stuck plenty, and while I can quickly unstick most problems the other devs face I can't solve all of them. Getting stuck still happens. The real difference between what I face now and early in my career is that I have developed a sense for when to plow through, when someone else might know the answer, and when to route around.…

I often talk about a type of pattern recognition with this sort of stuff. Over time you start to develop a sort of automatic pattern recognition skill that separates problems to "I've never seen this before" and "oh, this looks very similar to x". Also it becomes much easier to know what's hard and what's easy, like you said. You still obviously make the wrong call here and there. More often if you're in a completely…

I phrased it upthread as "make the same mistake enough times and you can start to smell it"