4 ms·

My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or year

by tdavis 17y ago

My proudest moments as a programmer are those where I manage to develop some functionality in a week or two that took another team of programmers months or years to do by using a novel approach or stitching together preexisting code. Every line of code I write is another I will have to maintain. Sooner or later it will be a burden. For this reason, I strive to write as few as possible. The programmers I respect most seem to follow the same pattern.

diN0bot 17y ago
i might be proud at first, but then i would be sad to think that others have failed so terribly and with so little guidance or wisdom. i would be saddened by my pitiful pride at a product so limited by its single creator. my proudest moments are when i'm collaborating with such flow that no one knows exactly where each idea came from, and at the end we have a powerful, awesome product that none of us could have built alone, that is seemingly greater than the sum of its contributors. i can understand it, i can see some of my contributions, and yet it is greater than me. add some social good and purpose and then i'd feel me some good pride.
- tdavis 17y ago
  You seem to have a very strict requirement for pride; I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I feel like life would be pretty depressing if I needed to create something greater than me for the social good that had a purpose just to feel proud of my accomplishment. You can only save the whales once. Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved a problem I haven't previously, I feel good about that. In 10 years doing this I've never collaborated on a project start to finish with other programmers but I imagine I'd feel good about that, too. I guess I just lack the ability to comprehend self-pity over a personal accomplishment.
  - alnayyir 17y ago
    >I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I don't know, I recall an (unnecessarily) hard-coded HTML form in a Django project with extremely poor input validation that somebody I knew wrote. It was a single field, single button form too, I might add. I refactored it with extreme prejudice.
    - tdavis 17y ago
      Your example only makes sense if that somebody was very proud of their hard-coded HTML form with poor validation. And even then, if it was better than they'd done before, they could still be proud. There are "pitiful" tiers of code, relative to those who find it pitiful, but there's no such thing as pitiful pride. Essentially din0's argument is "Hey, you shouldn't feel proud about that because I have done things I consider superior! Pity yourself!" I was just trying to point out the absurd nature of that argument.
ballpark 17y ago
I feel best when I'm deleting other's code, and accomplishing the same thing with much less code.
- rpledge 17y ago
  100% agree with this, less code = less maintenance. Very few people truly understand this and why it's important.
  - SapphireSun 17y ago
    In my latest app, I've noticed that I get the greatest highs when I write one specific function, and then rewrite it to be generic enough to handle four different elements. Great fun.
  - alnayyir 17y ago
    This is why I've never been impressed with people who are supposedly 10x programmers, but are actually people who just hammer out tons of code in response to any given problem. It strikes me that I'm seemingly one of the few people at my workplace who can handle abstracted functionality comfortable and make use of third party code/libraries without fear. tl;dr, I wrote a customer service app for my company in about a week flat.
litewulf 17y ago
(Though with the obvious caveat that code golf for the sake of code golf is not a good idea either. Readability is important, and sometimes, writing the naive code that is easy to explain and understand is better than the slightly more performant code)

by tdavis 17y ago

diN0bot 17y ago

i might be proud at first, but then i would be sad to think that others have failed so terribly and with so little guidance or wisdom. i would be saddened by my pitiful pride at a product so limited by its single creator. my proudest moments are when i'm collaborating with such flow that no one knows exactly where each idea came from, and at the end we have a powerful, awesome product that none of us could have built alone, that is seemingly greater than the sum of its contributors. i can understand it, i can see some of my contributions, and yet it is greater than me. add some social good and purpose and then i'd feel me some good pride.

tdavis 17y ago
You seem to have a very strict requirement for pride; I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I feel like life would be pretty depressing if I needed to create something greater than me for the social good that had a purpose just to feel proud of my accomplishment. You can only save the whales once. Anyway, as is the saying, "whatever gets you off". If I've managed to be particularly clever or efficient or solved a problem I haven't previously, I feel good about that. In 10 years doing this I've never collaborated on a project start to finish with other programmers but I imagine I'd feel good about that, too. I guess I just lack the ability to comprehend self-pity over a personal accomplishment.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  >I wasn't aware there was a "pitiful" tier. I don't know, I recall an (unnecessarily) hard-coded HTML form in a Django project with extremely poor input validation that somebody I knew wrote. It was a single field, single button form too, I might add. I refactored it with extreme prejudice.
  - tdavis 17y ago
    Your example only makes sense if that somebody was very proud of their hard-coded HTML form with poor validation. And even then, if it was better than they'd done before, they could still be proud. There are "pitiful" tiers of code, relative to those who find it pitiful, but there's no such thing as pitiful pride. Essentially din0's argument is "Hey, you shouldn't feel proud about that because I have done things I consider superior! Pity yourself!" I was just trying to point out the absurd nature of that argument.

ballpark 17y ago

I feel best when I'm deleting other's code, and accomplishing the same thing with much less code.

rpledge 17y ago
100% agree with this, less code = less maintenance. Very few people truly understand this and why it's important.
- SapphireSun 17y ago
  In my latest app, I've noticed that I get the greatest highs when I write one specific function, and then rewrite it to be generic enough to handle four different elements. Great fun.
- alnayyir 17y ago
  This is why I've never been impressed with people who are supposedly 10x programmers, but are actually people who just hammer out tons of code in response to any given problem. It strikes me that I'm seemingly one of the few people at my workplace who can handle abstracted functionality comfortable and make use of third party code/libraries without fear. tl;dr, I wrote a customer service app for my company in about a week flat.

litewulf 17y ago

(Though with the obvious caveat that code golf for the sake of code golf is not a good idea either. Readability is important, and sometimes, writing the naive code that is easy to explain and understand is better than the slightly more performant code)