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Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

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Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#1

Post by grimwall »

I switched careers and got into coding about five years ago and I have always wondered about this and am a little embarrassed about it.

Sometimes after finishing a big implementation, I just go back and read my own code ... and I like it! I feel proud that I translated some kind of abstract problem solving into a concrete solution, and somehow it works!

I feel like I created something that flows according to my ideas and it’s a joy to look at. Are there analogous feelings in other creative pursuits you practice?

Of course not everything is like this, only novel problems I encountered have potential to give this feeling, CRUD back-end endpoints are routine by now. Also I don't feel like an exceptional programmer, feel more like an impostor, so please don't read this as bragging.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#2

Post by cryptica »

I don't feel proud of my code if it works but I do feel terrible about it if it doesn't work perfectly. As soon as I realize that there is any problem in any of my projects, I need to drop everything and fix it immediately or else I can't sleep or think about anything else.

I guess not being able to carry on with my life if I know that my code has the slightest issue means that I assume it is perfect and therefore I'm idolizing it.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#4

Post by danielscrubs »

Not really. If you remove the algorithm part (which can be drawn very nicely and admired on paper) you have code. And code age, and it ages fast. Python 2 is not Python 3. C++11 is not C++20. I see the changes that need to be done instead of the beauty of the work.

There has been some exceptions, mainly in my Haskell-code, a monad still seems to be a monad and I start to see it with a more "math-focused-lens" and then I start to find some small admiration.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#5

Post by lidHanteyk »

That's just how some people are. For what it's worth, I can't look at anything I make and be happy with it; I only see the flaws, omissions, and infelicities. If you can be proud of what you make, then great!

Nobody cares either way, though; code ultimately has its own notion of quality, and human aesthetics are totally unrelated to code quality. We all must learn to think like computers and appreciate code like computers do.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#7

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #5

That's just how some people are. For what it's worth, I can't look at anything I make and be happy with it; I only see the flaws, omissions, and infelicities. If you can be proud of what you make, then great! Nobody cares either way, though; code ultimately has its own notion of quality, and human aesthetics are totally unrelated to code quality. We all must learn to think like computers and appreciate code like comp…

I find it differently... I look at the old code and look at the lessons I learned as I wrote items on top of each other... my projects are basically layers on top of each other.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#8

Post by vxxzy »

Yes. Early on in my career, I needed a function that produced a range of dates, given a start and end date. After it was all said and done, it boiled out like so:

  def daterange(start,end):
      while start
Though simplistic and straightforward, I admire the solution. I am sure there may be “better” ways to achieve the same result, and posting this here may result in cowboys trashing it or pointing out a fallacy - oh well... at the time, I was pretty satisfied with it and am still to this day.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#9

Post by Morian »

I generally admire the architecture and and some nice and elegant tricks on my past code, but not the code itself. I always feel like things could be cleaner, with better names, with a more consistent coding style (I am quite severe to my self on this point).

Much older code is generally neither smart neither beautiful though.

Re: Ask HN: Do you ever go back and admire a piece of code you wrote?

#10

Post by yetihehe »

lidHanteyk wrote: post #5

That's just how some people are. For what it's worth, I can't look at anything I make and be happy with it; I only see the flaws, omissions, and infelicities. If you can be proud of what you make, then great! Nobody cares either way, though; code ultimately has its own notion of quality, and human aesthetics are totally unrelated to code quality. We all must learn to think like computers and appreciate code like comp…

It depends on what you code. For me there must be three things for me to be proud of some codebase:

  1. I could use my creativity (it was not entirely defined problem which just needed to be translated to code).
  2. I have enough time to make it good, not rushed.
  3. Problem was a little over my current competence level, so I could learn something new.
If you only make CRUD forms day in/day out it's hard to be proud of what you do. Creating map display engine which is more performant than anything you have seen to date IS a thing to be proud of (I'm still proud of that one thing, but it's other firm's internal tool, so I can't show you). Unfortunately, for most developers being able to work on such things is very rare. I had maybe 5 such things over my 20 year career.
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