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Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

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Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#91

Post by mannykannot »

eeZah7Ux wrote: post #80
psyc wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm about your age, and I agree with everything here. My "process" is thinking through problems thoroughly and being careful. I used to be able to find whole teams full of people who worked like this, and during that time I worked on at least 5 outrageously successful, stable products, with no automated tests and no process other than test it manually and check it in. Eventually, time moved on and (mostly younger) pe…

> My "process" is thinking through problems thoroughly and being careful. I'm saddened by how thinking has become strangely uncommon. I've seen many teams where people either type code or have quick chats where they decide what to do on a whim.

It bugs me as well. The problem is that while 'just do it' is intuitively appealing, thinking things through is a discipline that needs to be actively chosen and learned, but who is teaching that? You don't have to spend much time in the software development blogosphere to see that there are quite a few people who seem to believe that thinking ahead is waterfall is anathema. This may not be a proper interpretation of Agile/TDD (I could argue otherwise), but it seems to be a fairly common one.

For the OP, I would say the point is to be skeptical of dogmatic claims about the proper way to develop software.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#92

Post by mseebach »

pavlov wrote: post #87
mseebach wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a pull engineer, and I work for a big, recognisable SV firm. I agree that hiring is fairly heavily biased towards push-types, but if you accept the premise and spend some quality time with some text books and online classes, you can come a long way (think of it as pull: if the goal is to work for Google, this is probably what you need to do). One thing is for certain, carrying around a chip on your shoulder becau…

Undoubtedly. A stint in the Navy can be very helpful if you plan to be a pirate.

A stint in the Navy can be very helpful for a great many other things, too, and it will do you no good to tell yourself that you can never join the Navy because you grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, even if it does mean you may have to do some things differently.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#93

Post by iask »

endymi0n wrote: post #84

To quote Ira Glass here: "Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your wor…

So true. It took me 10 years to master my skills. Am I perfect? I still question my skills on a frequent basis. Here is what I can confirm - it gets easier over time.

I can take on any small, large, extremely large and complex projects head on and amaze myself at the end.

The most difficult thing - being disciplined.

I will always admire someone else's code. I find it inspiring. I have on my bookshelf "Beautiful Code".

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#94

Post by spacemanmatt »

rubicon33 wrote: post #14

Passion. It sounds too simple, but it's true. My best, most thoughtful, and beautiful work, has been done when I've been intrinsically motivated by the sheer interest and desire to do that work. In some ways, I was a better, faster, smarter programmer, with 3 months of experience than I am now. That's not objectively true, but the point remains valid. If you're struggling, you may need to re-ignite that fire. Try and…

Seconded. My best architecture work has been informed by my experience in implementation, and vice-versa. Therein lay the art.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#96

Post by enraged_camel »

harperlee wrote: post #90
enraged_camel wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Furthermore, there is no way of knowing whether the code you see is version 1 or version 10. Maybe they hammered away at local copies for months before finally figuring out the optimal design.

Well the OP explicitly mentions that he has been looking at the timeline between commits, so that point is moot. Even if some commits are missing, you can see the rate of change of the project - "invisible" offline commits would have a noticeable impact on the productivity of the "visible" one s in parallel.

>>Well the OP explicitly mentions that he has been looking at the timeline between commits, so that point is moot.

My point is that he can't see the commits on the developer's local repositories. You know, the ones they never upload to Github.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#98

Post by johan_larson »

thrwythrwy wrote: post #33
droidist2 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does really bother me that we've created a culture centered around Cracking the Code Interview and cramming for interviews.

agreed, we should thank google for that (or not) :)

It didn't start with Google. Microsoft was doing much the same thing back in the nineties.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#99

Post by mooreds »

rqebmm wrote: post #29
liquidise wrote: post #20

There are 2 things i feel correlate strongly with the best devs i know: 1. Quantity leads to Quality. This has been written about by a number of people and for good reason. As with any craft, quality is born from doing something in repetition and learning from your mistakes. There is a brilliant anecdote on this from a ceramics class of all things ( https://blog.codinghorror.com/quantity-always-trumps-quality... ). S…

I mostly agree, but I'd add an important caveat to (2): Before you go looking for a new job because you're not being challenged, ask to work on other projects at your current job. I've found this is a much better way to learn new languages/stacks/architectures/patterns since you already have a lot of the relevant tribal and contextual knowledge.

To say nothing of the fact that at your current company you are a known quantity, which can open doors that are simply unavailable to a candidate.

Re: Ask HN: Maybe I kind of suck as a programmer – how do I supercharge my work?

#100

Post by bmh100 »

mamcx wrote: post #21

Do you know when some naive people claim that build a "simple CRUD app" is easy, but a OS or a Database engine or a Game engine or Language or Super-Cool-Algo_performace-magnificence or Super-Science-thingy is hard? All of them are super-wrong. All of them are long, hard projects. All of them requiere specific skills, that maybe are hard to know because you don't find much info about how do them (for example, I haven…

What do you mean by "relational language"? I'm imagining SQL when you say that, but I guess you have something different in mind. You've piqued my interest.
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