Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

michaelbromley.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 118 posts

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#71

Post by gajomi »

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…

>Is that really true?

It's almost certainly not true, at least among those that would be called mathematicians. This follows if for no other reason than the fact that it takes years to get up to speed with the forefront of any particular branch of mathematics, which is the prerequisite for testing out one's mathematical abilities (in the context of research). While you occasionally have a few teenage prodigies, most mathematicians won't get started on their career until much later.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#72

Post by lugg »

einhverfr wrote: post #48
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…

> Those 100 line functions wouldn't make it through any half decent code review. True but I have worked on worse. The codebase we inherited from SQL-Ledger is quite a bit worse and was even more poorly commented when we forked (the only comments, aside from two lines describing the module, and copyright notices, were magic comments which if you delete things, stuff breaks). And some of the modules were 4-5k lines wit…

I hate to be all, my pile of spaghetti is bigger than your pile of spaghetti, yet I just can't help myself

- 2 decades in development

- just under 3k "scripts", mixture of php html "fusion", php classes, and last decade or so templates have been added

- last wc -l check, was well into 1m lines in house code

- database (we have a few), >300 tables, it used to be around 4 but we culled some tables / systems

This is our oldest system, still in use, still extremely business critical, we're doing a similar thing to you moving things out, cleaning house so to speak. But its going to be ongoing for a long time to come thats for sure.

Some of the people in this thread should get together and start a new dailywtf clone. Pretty sure we could preload a years worth of content with nothing but grep and git-log.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#73

Post by jheriko »

There are some absolute, rather than relative measures that you can use to gauge your skill. For engineering fields (not just software) the 'toolmaker' analogy is a good one i find. Until you understand what involved in making the specialist tools you need for your field, and can actually make those tools yourself then you are far from mastery.

This is not entirely straightforward though - a bit of a rabbit hole you could say. e.g. should a programmer stop at the compiler? The CPU? The circuitry? Electronic components? The laws of nature? Tools are built with other tools after all and some tools are provided by nature...

On the other hand, if you haven't made even the first step towards understanding your tools then thats not really a problem to worry about.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#74

Post by ygra »

grey-area wrote: post #62
saganus wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here regarding version control.. until one day I after graduating from college I nostalgically searched for my old college files... and... oh the horror... my files where somewhere between "project1.final_backup_almost_final.java" and "project15.final_not_working.java.backup3" going through more strange things which I can't even think of why I named files like that, along the lines of "epsiloneridani43.final_wor…

You see a huge amount of this sort of poor-man's version control in other industries - everyone I have worked with in other industries has worked out some personal scheme of versioning using initials, dates, numbering in order to sequence the various states of their work as it passes through multiple people and multiple versions. A lot of room for disruption there I think if someone works out how to make version cont…

File History in Windows 8 is nice, sort of. It takes snapshots of changed files every hour. Sadly you have to enable it first and it's sort-of treated as a backup (so you have to store the copies on a different volume, etc.). So, not exactly what people have in their home unless they know about such things.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#75

Post by collyw »

lugg wrote: post #56
mml wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hope you get paid well.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#76

Post by collyw »

ritchiea wrote: post #16

What are the best ways to get better?

I have been working on my own code base for the last 3 years. It is constantly evolving, and requirements constantly change. I often have to revisit a piece of code I worked on 6 months ago. That is the best time to tell. If your own code doesn't make sense to you fairly quickly, it is worth refactoring. Look it and ask yourself why it is difficult to understand and what you could do to make it better.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#77

Post by collyw »

akbar501 wrote: post #25

I've found the following really sets apart my programming now vs. earlier in my career: 1. I write and rewrite more now. I view the first time the code works as just the first draft (like I would with a paper). Earlier in my career I thought that making it work meant I was done. 2. I spend a lot more time thinking about what's happening in the code and why. I have found some of my best work to happen after days of th…

> I'm increasingly tolerant of other technologies.

I would like to think I am, but recently I have noticed that everyone seems to want to jump on the NoSQL bandwagon. A lot of the jobs I see I would be a good fit want experience using MongoDB (or something similar).

I have been looking to learn them, but having read up on the technologies, I can't find a reasonable use case for any of them in my own work. One that would not be equally or better suited to Postgres or MySQL (which I know well).

I have come to the conclusion that 90% of people using NoSQL don't actually need it, and are throwing away a lot of useful features just so they can play with the latest fad.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#78

Post by chrislomax »

Although I generally do not post something that is not constructive to an article, I have to say, I bought the same magazine when I was younger with Borland on and that is what made me want to become a programmer!

I was amazed when I read that point. The only difference is that I couldn't get anything to build in Borland. I started out in BASIC making my motherboard beep to tunes in a BAT file.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#79

Post by collyw »

gedrap wrote: post #36

From both my own experience and witnessing others, one major factor that sets apart from beginner and expert is working with legacy code. And by legacy I mean legacy from previous developer, previous team, whatever, not necessarily a decade old code base. Beginners are keen to get rid of all the legacy code. It's tightly coupled, it's hard to read, hard to maintain, yada yada yada. And then they tend to make a way to…

I had a nightmare of VB6 code to work on. Something like 3/4 of a million lines, and lots of deadlines to meet. No consideration given to quality - just have it working by friday. It was in the financial industry.

On more than one occasion you would write a subroutine to do something, then a month or two later, you would see someone had already written that same functionality.

Re: Confessions of an Intermediate Programmer

#80

Post by hrktb »

ameister14 wrote: post #14

For me the thing I had to learn was commenting more than anything else; working alone I never saw as much use for it. Then I worked with a guy that commented his code very well and suddenly I saw massive value in it. I'm definitely still an intermediate programmer, but I think I was always fine admitting that to myself. It was getting over the fear of others reading and modifying my code that took me a while.

It depends on the people working with you, sometimes I feel commenting should be left for edge cases only. More often than not it seemed that people read the comments and stop focusing when reading the code; they just check if it vaguely matches the comments. When foregoing comments entirely there was much better feedbacks and questions on important points, the understandig of the code base seemed much better.

The latter also forces you to keep a very clean code, and tricky parts (things you couldn't simplify nor make self explanatory) surface better.

Post reply on HN