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Yeah man coming from CMU there is an intense focus on not getting lost in microtrends and "new" ideas which are simply rehashing what's already been done. You w

Yeah man coming from CMU there is an intense focus on not getting lost in microtrends and "new" ideas which are simply rehashing what's already been done. You want to avoid poisoning your mind by learning say functional programming in Rambda.js instead of going straight to the source. Before CMU I would pour over blog posts by amateur developers arguing that Ruby on Rails is always better than PHP or some other trite overdetermined point like that. After school I will actually look at their background to see if they are someone worth listening to or if there are just another bad developer with an opinion. A lesson that stuck with me from systems class was (paraphrasing here) "you want to be the power programmer who truly understands how the system works and can solve bugs nobody else can, and the only way to do that is to crack a book and read about how operating systems work, how networking works, etc instead of being stuck in user land, unable to deal with situations where the abstractions break"

sokoloff 10y ago
The second half of your comment really resonates with me. I was generally pretty good at really understanding how things worked at the system level, but there is one friend I used to work with who was simply amazing at it. He was the guy who would go deep on our web farm, figure out what was wrong in the garbage collector, monkey patch a workaround, and send a bug report to Microsoft with what needed to be changed on 16-core NUMA machines, saving us 25% of performance across the farm AND reduce page times by a 100ms or so. Or troubleshoot a sporadic network issue by isolating the issue via testing in production (without access to the network gear) and tell the network team where the bottleneck is. (Needless to say, this can ruffle some feathers of the easily offended, or with the people who believe that purity is more important than functional and that one simply shouldn't write code that understands you're running on a NUMA machine, but it was amazing to watch time after time.) He's moved on to another local company where I've heard from him (and others) that he continues to do the same over there.

sokoloff 10y ago

The second half of your comment really resonates with me. I was generally pretty good at really understanding how things worked at the system level, but there is one friend I used to work with who was simply amazing at it. He was the guy who would go deep on our web farm, figure out what was wrong in the garbage collector, monkey patch a workaround, and send a bug report to Microsoft with what needed to be changed on 16-core NUMA machines, saving us 25% of performance across the farm AND reduce page times by a 100ms or so. Or troubleshoot a sporadic network issue by isolating the issue via testing in production (without access to the network gear) and tell the network team where the bottleneck is. (Needless to say, this can ruffle some feathers of the easily offended, or with the people who believe that purity is more important than functional and that one simply shouldn't write code that understands you're running on a NUMA machine, but it was amazing to watch time after time.) He's moved on to another local company where I've heard from him (and others) that he continues to do the same over there.