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A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

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Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#3

Post by csomar »

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it.

Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and software development, as well as entertainment.

I'm on Web development for more than 4 years. It's an overwhelming field, if you ask me. Lots of stuff: Web servers (picked Abyss, played with Apache), HTTP, HTTPS (and SSL), Server Side (picked PHP), Database (picked mySql, played with Mongo), HTML5 (lots of new API), JavaScript (not that simple, and a new spec. is coming), CSS3, Photoshop (some skills to get by).

And then there are lots of other things: caching, optimization, patterns, ORM, CMS (WordPress, Drupal...), frameworks (CodeIgniter, Symphony...), libraries (jQuery, Prototype...), best-practices, security (SQL injections, encryption...), Unit Testing (Jasmin, PHPunit...), Code Inspection (JSlint), IDEs (Aptana, PHPstorm...), Mobiles (Titanium, Sencha...)

And certainly for business (you probably run your server on Ubuntu) there is Postfix, dovecot for email, SFTP for an FTP server, Mercurial or Git for Version Control and some other stuff to monitor your servers (and maybe services)

And then there is more stuff, if you run an online business like HN, SmashingMagazine, GitHub, Envato, AppStore and all social networks, magazines, markets...

So how can you do it? First, it'll take years. Second, you must live it. When you live it, you'll forget about the quantity, and with time you'll keep all those things in your head.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#4

Post by [deleted] »

csomar wrote: post #3

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and softwa…

[deleted]

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#5

Post by charliesome »

csomar wrote: post #3

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and softwa…

I doubt you have complete understanding though.

Do you understand how SSL works? Do you know your way around PHP's internals? Do you know exactly how TCP, IP, Ethernet, etc work? Could you write a Photoshop plugin? Do you understand how parsers and compilers work?

I doubt you (or anyone else for that matter) could answer yes to all those questions. That's the point I think this blog post is getting at. It's no longer possible (question for the reader: was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes?) to have a complete understanding of how all the technologies you use every day work.

A lot of people have a decent understanding of most things they need to deal with. That's probably good enough to get by.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#6

Post by nzmsv »

csomar wrote: post #3

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and softwa…

This depends on the definition of "complete". Yes, you've described a pretty comprehensive summary of the web stack and related tools. But this is all application software. What about the underlying network protocols? The OS kernel? The CPU architecture? Cache coherency protocols? Direct memory access to shuffle data to the network card? The physical layer signalling to get this data across the wire? PCB layout? Schematic design? How about the power supply for all this?

A couple decades ago one could actually buy a computer as a kit and put the circuit boards together. And even then it was unlikely that you could know everything: even if you were Woz, you probably would not have seen the masks used to make the CPU.

Re: A Complete Understanding is No Longer Possible

#10

Post by wladimir »

charliesome wrote: post #5
csomar wrote: post #3

That's not true. You can have complete understanding. You actually should have, if you want to be recognized in the industry. You need more than just learning, you need to live it. Pick an Operating System, and an environment. I'm using Windows, for more than 10 years now. And that's why I'm not moving to OS X any time soon. I'm incredibly good with Windows, and it can handle all of my daily business work, and softwa…

I doubt you have complete understanding though. Do you understand how SSL works? Do you know your way around PHP's internals? Do you know exactly how TCP, IP, Ethernet, etc work? Could you write a Photoshop plugin? Do you understand how parsers and compilers work? I doubt you (or anyone else for that matter) could answer yes to all those questions. That's the point I think this blog post is getting at. It's no longer…

was it ever possible, given how deep the rabbit hole goes?

I don't think so. People have always complained that the more you know, the more you realize you don't know.

But lately we're more and more confronted with our limitations as humans. There are so darn many details, so much information.

And no field is static, it's hard to keep up. As programmers/software engineers we're required to have a lot of specific product knowledge. And much of it is very important at one point, and nearly useless the next moment, as new versions are released, as new systems replace the older ones, and old assumptions are overturned.

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