For those who can't access the website, I found the article is also available on GitHub here: https://github.com/mre/endler.dev/blob/master/content/2025/b...
The best programmers I know
71–80 of 320 posts
Re: The best programmers I know
#72https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de... Otherwise rate limited
wondering how can a static blog can be rate limited :|
Re: The best programmers I know
#73Re: The best programmers I know
#74Reading documentation - if you are junior take time to go one level deeper to understand / fix issues you have. Then read also stuff adjacent to that. By trying to read some documentation like a book from cover to cover will be waste of time.
Reading documentation cover to cover for tools you use a lot is a very worthwhile investment in my opinion. Junior dev or not.
Re: The best programmers I know
#75Re: The best programmers I know
#76https://web.archive.org/web/20250409082704/https://endler.de... Otherwise rate limited
wondering how can a static blog can be rate limited :|
This is what happens when you run your blog behind cloudflare workers - they want you on pages instead, or to pay $5/month forever on the off chance you get slashdotted...
Re: The best programmers I know
#77Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…
I also agree with most of it, apart from that. I actually think this advice comes from the different ways people learn. And if you don't learn the way the author does, this advice feels wrong and jarring.
I learn by doing, not reading. If I read something but don't actually use it I'm liable to forget it. My brain seems to classify it as "not practical, not needed". If I do actually use it, however, I tend to learn it quickly.
So for me documentation is pretty terrible, reading how something works doesn't help, I need to see examples. When I see something in action, I actually learn it. Even copy/pasting works as I'll poke at the copied code, changing variables, playing with params, add/remove comments, etc. No code is ever just copied, it's always manipulated, cleaned up, unnecessary cruft removed.
And there's a whole load of documentation out there that has no examples, or really poor examples that don't relate to how you want to use something.
And for me with an API that doesn't make "sense" I find it really hard to ever remember. Like SQL Server's "OVER" clause, I've used it intermittently over the years and every time I come to use it, I have to re-learn it again. I find those sort of APIs really frustrating.
Re: The best programmers I know
#78Can't find any fault in this article. Agree with pretty much everything except for one point: "Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written." It has been, I think, close to 15+ years since I have been actively coding professionally. I am always learning. When I started my career I spent a fair bit of time answerin…
This is why I love LLMS. I drop 200, 100+ page 13F filing reports into Gemini, and after 10 minutes, it finds anomalies for me. This was impossible before, as these reports are not standardized at all.
I do the same even just for logs where I can't be bothered formatting it for a proper field by field diff.
Re: The best programmers I know
#79> Really Read the Error Message and Try to Understand What’s Written
This is a surprising stumbling block for a lot of developers when they encounter a problem. Most times the solution is hiding in plain sight (albeit at least one level of abstraction lower sometimes) and reading what the error was can help to quickly solve an issue.
Anecdotal evidence: We use `asdf` for managing Python, Go and NodeJS versions for our main project. On a fresh Fedora/Ubuntu install, running `asfd install` fails to compile Python as it is missing a few dependencies that are required for Python's standard library. The output that is provided when the `asdf` command fails is pretty self explanatory IF you care to read it.
Re: The best programmers I know
#80Note that this says "best programmers" not "people best at having business impact by making software". I wonder about this often: If you want to have impact/solve problems/make money, not just optimizing killing your JIRA tickets, should you invest a given hour into understanding the lowest code layer of framework X, or talk to people in the business domain? Read documentation or a book on accessibility in embedded s…
Generally we aren't paid for our business expertise. In fact, most businesses actively resist giving developers deep domain responsibility. This is manifest in management methodologies: developers are largely interchangeable cells in a spreadsheet. I'm not saying this is a good thing. The reasons for this are complex, but generally, business people want us to solve the technical problems they can't handle themselves,…
Yep. A developer with "business impact" might be seen as a liability.
One aspect might be that a developer who engages in "business" effectively stops being "subordinate". Management decisions need to be justified on a different level to maintain legitimacy.