3 ms·

Hi, I'm the author. I think you've done a lot of reading between the lines. The intention of the article was to get people inspired to try experiment and explo

• mikekchar 11y ago
  First, thank you for the article. I found it interesting reading and I know it is quite hard to take a risk by writing something that might be interpreted badly by others. But since you are here, I thought you might appreciate some feedback. One of the biggest problems with programmers in general is not their conservatism, but rather the wide variety of opinions that are incompatible. Or, possibly in a less polite way of framing it: programmers are often wrong. One time one of my young colleagues opined that while he was sometimes wrong, there was no way that he could be wrong all the time. I had to think about it a lot, but I realized eventually that, yes, it is actually quite easy to be wrong all the time as a programmer. You speak very enthusiastically about measuring your success and taking action based on a rigorous scientific approach, but I don't think you will be successful. Or at least, if you are then you are doing something extraordinary and I will very much look forward to your next blog post ;-) A massive problem in this industry is confirmation bias. That's when we have an idea and we go out looking for evidence that it is correct. If we find said evidence, we often feel vindicated in our beliefs. Unfortunately if we have not also searched for evidence that we are wrong, then we have fallen victim to this bias. Reading blog posts of people you respect and trying out techniques to see if you agree is fantastic. However, it's also a great way to fall victim to confirmation bias. Soon, you start to see thing coloured one way and people who do not agree seem to be wrong, or at least out of date. 1.5 years is not enough time to be able to form reasonable judgements about whether the application of a technique is good or not. At the very least you need to be able to build a huge code base and let it crumble under its own weight before you can even begin to see the issues involved. Write at least 100,000 lines of code first and then re-evaluate your position. Better to write 500,000 or even a million lines. I started programming at the age of 9. I'm 48 now. I got my first paying gig at 18 and there have been many, many more days in my life where I have been programming than where I haven't. I can tell you that I'm not holding on to my old techniques with a death grip. It's just that in several decades of being a professional programmer, I know thousands of ways to fail and only a few to succeed. I sincerely wish you the best in your adventure and I hope you keep the spirit you have now. Just understand that the terrain gets considerably more rocky as you go forward ;-).
  • cmdv 11y ago
    Hi, thank you for your constructive response, I agree with what you are saying. Due to the length of my experience it's going to be hard to give my beliefs any sort of foundation to an experienced programmer. With this in mind I also wrote the article to hear and learn from other people's constructive views. I believe there is no shame in being wrong, because to me that is the only way one will ever learn and improve. I also try to be aware of trying not to fall into the bias trap, so I try to use the null hypothesis when it comes to choosing what to follow or learn. But most importantly I want to learn a subject in which I take a real interest and passion. Then branch out from there. Like I mentioned before, the primary goal for my article is to inspire people to experiment and try things that might not be what the mass agree with and actually give it a go and taking it further than checking if the repo has enough stars. Plenty of companies pay for developers to experiment and it would be impossible for all companies to afford this. At the same time there are plenty of chip100 companies that don't have any OSS projects yet they are clearly reaping the benefits. That comment is me being optimistic and potentially not a realist due to the harsh nature of business. Thank you again for the response. :)
• jcizzle 11y ago
  I got the same impression that this guy did from your article, as well. It sounds like you are taking your limited experience and projecting it through the lens of various media (which includes places like this) to come up with an understanding of what 'the industry' is. You may be 35 years old, but in the same way 'number of years experience' doesn't make someone a good programmer, number of years living doesn't necessarily make someone wise. It's OK to fire off some thoughts, but don't be surprised when people with a different perspective and more wisdom let you know you're missing some pieces.
• tonyjstark 11y ago
  I think with the ending of your article it got more into the direction that you state here. People should experiment, try out new things and don't be afraid of new stuff. Learning is always good as long as it gets reflected upon and learning is seldom useless. But the tone you set at the beginning is harsh and it does not feel like you spend a lot of time with more experienced developers. They are often so experienced because they didn't stop learning. And then the whole article has some anecdotal feeling. Everybody had different experiences with different communities, I for myself had the feeling that many researchers at the university often are only interested in their specific topic. While all my programming colleagues did tons of other stuff where they had to learn things like brewing, cooking, playing instruments and so on. But now I work in an environment with researchers from the humanities and they're overly exited about digital research methods and they invest a lot of energy into learning those. On the other hand, the last time I attended a meeting of Nodejs people I saw a presentation about a new cool framework for restful APIs that used experimental features of Nodejs and the presenter stated that he used it while developing a backend for a random client. I'm pretty sure the client would have liked a bit of grumpiness against new frameworks there. At last, a lot of innovation is driven by big companies. Think about Andrei Alexandrescu and his work at Facebook or Simon Peyton Jones at Microsoft Research (only to name a few).
• cmdv 11y ago
  the above was a response to @roel_v :)