10 ms·

I am a mediocre developer

92 points by janvdberg 9y ago

saintPirelli 9y ago
I'm not even a mediocre developer, since I'm just a hobbyist, but I have found it extremely helpful to invest the time and just sit down with a printed out 'cheat sheet' and learn standard library functions and standard packages and their functions by heart. Just recently did it with peewee.
- photonios 9y ago
  Do you feel this significantly speeds up development? I've always found this a pointless exercise since I can get the answer I need with a quick Google search. After working with a language or library for some time, most of these things become muscle memory. Rather than making a conscious effort to remember all of these things, I let my brain unconsciously decide what's important enough to remember.
  - saintPirelli 9y ago
    I think it does. Not because I save the time of the Google search, but I can apply the functions and methods without distraction. Sure, a quick websearch is nothing that really holds you back in terms of time spent, but it opens a new tab in your browser and your brain and will divert your attention away from solving the actual problem you are working on.
  - glic3rinu 9y ago
    A mix of the two approaches might yield the best results. At work I usually go by looking for quick solutions for the very specific problems I encounter, e.g. disable echo on a terminal, send data through a socket, ... And what I sometimes do over the weekend is to go over the problems I had and try to learn from the subject in a more generic way. e.g. learn TTY inner workings by reading the source code of python's pty.py standard library module, read the socket's documentation and understand all available socket operations, or watch some conference talk on the subject over youtube ... This second consolidation phase has proven very useful to me. Not only because of discovering interesting gems hidden in standard libraries and other references, but also to be able to anticipate and solve really weird/low-level bugs that otherwise would have been very difficult to approach.
- majewsky 9y ago
  If you have a cheat sheet on your desk, why do you also have to memorize it?
  - saintPirelli 9y ago
    To keep a clean desk.
cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
You can't possibly be a "mediocre developer" if you do all that mentioned in the article. I guess that was the joke :) Re: "I google simplest things all the time", I once wrote my own regular expression parser, context free grammar parser, etc. in Lisp, Python, Perl, and JavaScript. But to this day I still have to google javascript syntax to work with regular expression for certain things. Memory is no longer a competitive advantage, the real competitive advantage is the ability and discipline to do everything OP talks about in the post
- sjapkee 9y ago
  He uses good practices, but at the time he can be bad dev. Because programming isn't about variable naming and etc. It's about writing working algorithms and if you can't do this, then nobody cares how good you at not writing working things.
  - cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
    True, I just remembered there are too many developers nowadays just blindly focused on "best practice" so that they can be "seen as" a good developer, but the real good developers are the ones who actually come up with creative solutions to get things done and not always dogmatic about these things.
    - alex_hitchins 9y ago
      A good dev is one who knows when they write bad code, IMO.
  - didymospl 9y ago
    If programming is really about writing algorithms then why people(both candidates and employers) complain about whiteboard interviews? I think that most of the programming done today are in fact declarative due to abundance of high-level languages frameworks, libraries and other great tools that abstract business logic away from the low level imperative instructions. Obviously it's good to know how everything works behind the scenes but I know many people who are far less familiar with the CS basics than me yet they are tremendously more productive in software development.
ralphm 9y ago
A great keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2015 along similar lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE
LandR 9y ago
Sounds like most developers, honestly. I think about 5% of all developers out there nowadays are actually good developers. IME, most would have no idea what to do if you took away stackoverflow or their abstractions that make their day manageable. A part of the problem might be that a lot I've met aren't at all interested in development, it's a job and they like the pay. They also just see it as a stepping stone to management. When I do ask people at work how something actually works they rarely know. I get told just use 'x' it hides all that stuff away for you! When I bring up basic concepts around coding, and therefore issues in their code, I get blank stares. I mean, i've seen me having to explain to a C# dev with a few years experience why something like the following didn't work: string s = "foobar"; s.Substring(1, 2); Console.WriteLine(s); He didn't know strings were immutable, didn't know how to understand the documentation for Substring and had never heard of immutability. Similarly, I've had to explain why something like the following prints 5 and not 6: void Main() { int x = 5; Foo(x); Console.WriteLine(x); } void Foo(int x) => x++; A developer this time who had no idea about reference types & value types. I don't know how we fix this though. As the people hiring and doing the interviews often don't know what they are doing either. So the blind hires the blind.
- photonios 9y ago
  Were the people to whom you had to explain those concepts juniors or people with a couple of years of experience?
  - LandR 9y ago
    A few years experience (3+)
- foepys 9y ago
  This is imho the difference between someone who graduated with a Bachelor (or higher) in computer science and somebody who completed a 3 month coding bootcamp. Before people get upset, yes, there are devs without a degree that know what they are doing.
  - 9y ago
hodl 9y ago
Good tooling can save you a lot of googling mentioned here. Your editor should tell you the required order of arguments, for example.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
Fradow 9y ago
One thing that saved my bacon is to write scripts that test production data is valid (for the few things that cannot be enforced by the DB, at least not easily). Invariably, those scripts found invalid data, which pointed to hard to spot bugs. Catching those early saved me from having huge amounts of invalid data to manually sort through.
- hnarn 9y ago
  Do you want to give a quick example?
  - Fradow 9y ago
    Sure, let's say you have an organization, in which you have users and devices, so users and devices have a nullable FK to organization. Also, a device can be linked to a user, so a device has a nullable FK to a user. Now, when a device is linked to a user, both should be on the same organization, right? I don't see how to easily do that as a constraint (but I have to admit my SQL skills is quite low, and I avoid bypassing the ORM). Well, in production, devices might land somewhere else, and now you have a device that is supposed to be on organization A which is linked to a user on organization B, if you didn't force the organization when a device is linked to a user. Depending on your use case, it could be expected, an operational error, or something that should be resolved automatically. Edit: another example. We have a legacy system. Part of the data is supposed to be mirrored on both new and legacy system, via API calls (I don't know of a better way, I'm not a great dev, DB are different, not shared and on a different provider). Well, check if they are actually the same from time to time (at least the obvious stuff).
    - hnarn 9y ago
      >Now, when a device is linked to a user, both should be on the same organization, right? I don't see how to easily do that as a constraint I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to SQL either, but in this case wouldn't it be better if the "Device" table had two columns: "UserOwner" and "OrgOwner" which in turn have FK connections to "Users" and "Organizations". If the logic is that every device is only owned by a user or an org (never both) at any time, you could constrain: check(UserOwner is null or OrgOwner is null).
mnm1 9y ago
Not memorizing pointless shit (argument order, all function names, etc.) is actually a sign of a skilled developer who uses memory for important things, not things that can be looked up on Google in a second. Yes, if the Internet drops all productivity stops, but that's not because everyone needs to copy shit from stackoverflow every 2.5 seconds. Being able to develop without an Internet connection ... whoopty fucking do. Not impressive at all (unless you're trying to do well at a stupid whiteboarding interview) since without Internet, I'm pretty sure all work grinds to a halt and it's a ridiculous situation to prepare for. Why not code without computers (again, getting into the territory of beyond stupid interviewing here, the only place where this would be useful)? If you want to be a good developer, relying on memory and memorization for trivial things is a terrible use of your own inner resources as is trying to be productive in an environment without proper tools (no Internet / computer to work on).
- saintPirelli 9y ago
  Human memory doesn't work like your hard drive. The notion that you have some sort of 'free disk space', because you don't remember function names is ludicrous. Quite contrary, the more you train your memory, the more you can remember.
  - mnm1 9y ago
    I didn't say it works like a hard drive. Yeah, the more I train, the more I remember what I trained and remembering function names and argument order is something I specifically don't want to do because I can only train my memory for so long each day and I'd rather remember important things, not trivial shit like that.
- dotsh 9y ago
  You know that before SO and Google all dev community was doing well? Using manuals and stuff that are typically on your machine from day one or from moment you install something you want to code in. Now it is: No Internet = No Coding. Then: No Internet = Who needs this shit?!
alkonaut 9y ago
This blog post has the paradoxal property that the act of writing seems to immediately contradict it. This person does not seem mediocre. He's humble, that goes a long way.
ggm 9y ago
I'd kill to be mediocre. Being a bad developer is my pinnacle achievement.
lowry 9y ago
#metoo
zaarn 9y ago
I would argue that OP isn't mediocre if they accept their faults. I also search on SO a lot ("how to check for string prefix in PHP" or my favorite "php variable reference"). A good programmer is someone who can see the architecture of a program when given a high-level description of the problem. Someone who I can realistically tell "write me a program to backup my files" and will end up writing a reasonable backup system. Someone who I can task with coming up with an application protocol with certain constraints. In short, someone who can be an artist, engineer or scientist depending on what is needed. Good practices are largely irrelevant to being a good developer, you can be a good dev writing spaghetti code and a bad dev using TDD and OOP.
ld00d 9y ago
As a more mediocre developer than the author, I would add that instead of copy-pasting code, you actually type it out. This makes it stick better for me.

92 points by janvdberg 9y ago

I'm not even a mediocre developer, since I'm just a hobbyist, but I have found it extremely helpful to invest the time and just sit down with a printed out 'cheat sheet' and learn standard library functions and standard packages and their functions by heart. Just recently did it with peewee.

photonios 9y ago
Do you feel this significantly speeds up development? I've always found this a pointless exercise since I can get the answer I need with a quick Google search. After working with a language or library for some time, most of these things become muscle memory. Rather than making a conscious effort to remember all of these things, I let my brain unconsciously decide what's important enough to remember.
- saintPirelli 9y ago
  I think it does. Not because I save the time of the Google search, but I can apply the functions and methods without distraction. Sure, a quick websearch is nothing that really holds you back in terms of time spent, but it opens a new tab in your browser and your brain and will divert your attention away from solving the actual problem you are working on.
- glic3rinu 9y ago
  A mix of the two approaches might yield the best results. At work I usually go by looking for quick solutions for the very specific problems I encounter, e.g. disable echo on a terminal, send data through a socket, ... And what I sometimes do over the weekend is to go over the problems I had and try to learn from the subject in a more generic way. e.g. learn TTY inner workings by reading the source code of python's pty.py standard library module, read the socket's documentation and understand all available socket operations, or watch some conference talk on the subject over youtube ... This second consolidation phase has proven very useful to me. Not only because of discovering interesting gems hidden in standard libraries and other references, but also to be able to anticipate and solve really weird/low-level bugs that otherwise would have been very difficult to approach.
majewsky 9y ago
If you have a cheat sheet on your desk, why do you also have to memorize it?
- saintPirelli 9y ago
  To keep a clean desk.

cocktailpeanuts 9y ago

You can't possibly be a "mediocre developer" if you do all that mentioned in the article. I guess that was the joke :) Re: "I google simplest things all the time", I once wrote my own regular expression parser, context free grammar parser, etc. in Lisp, Python, Perl, and JavaScript. But to this day I still have to google javascript syntax to work with regular expression for certain things. Memory is no longer a competitive advantage, the real competitive advantage is the ability and discipline to do everything OP talks about in the post

sjapkee 9y ago
He uses good practices, but at the time he can be bad dev. Because programming isn't about variable naming and etc. It's about writing working algorithms and if you can't do this, then nobody cares how good you at not writing working things.
- cocktailpeanuts 9y ago
  True, I just remembered there are too many developers nowadays just blindly focused on "best practice" so that they can be "seen as" a good developer, but the real good developers are the ones who actually come up with creative solutions to get things done and not always dogmatic about these things.
  - alex_hitchins 9y ago
    A good dev is one who knows when they write bad code, IMO.
- didymospl 9y ago
  If programming is really about writing algorithms then why people(both candidates and employers) complain about whiteboard interviews? I think that most of the programming done today are in fact declarative due to abundance of high-level languages frameworks, libraries and other great tools that abstract business logic away from the low level imperative instructions. Obviously it's good to know how everything works behind the scenes but I know many people who are far less familiar with the CS basics than me yet they are tremendously more productive in software development.

ralphm 9y ago

A great keynote by Jacob Kaplan-Moss at PyCon 2015 along similar lines: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIJdFxYlEKE

LandR 9y ago

Sounds like most developers, honestly. I think about 5% of all developers out there nowadays are actually good developers. IME, most would have no idea what to do if you took away stackoverflow or their abstractions that make their day manageable. A part of the problem might be that a lot I've met aren't at all interested in development, it's a job and they like the pay. They also just see it as a stepping stone to management. When I do ask people at work how something actually works they rarely know. I get told just use 'x' it hides all that stuff away for you! When I bring up basic concepts around coding, and therefore issues in their code, I get blank stares. I mean, i've seen me having to explain to a C# dev with a few years experience why something like the following didn't work: string s = "foobar"; s.Substring(1, 2); Console.WriteLine(s); He didn't know strings were immutable, didn't know how to understand the documentation for Substring and had never heard of immutability. Similarly, I've had to explain why something like the following prints 5 and not 6: void Main() { int x = 5; Foo(x); Console.WriteLine(x); } void Foo(int x) => x++; A developer this time who had no idea about reference types & value types. I don't know how we fix this though. As the people hiring and doing the interviews often don't know what they are doing either. So the blind hires the blind.

photonios 9y ago
Were the people to whom you had to explain those concepts juniors or people with a couple of years of experience?
- LandR 9y ago
  A few years experience (3+)
foepys 9y ago
This is imho the difference between someone who graduated with a Bachelor (or higher) in computer science and somebody who completed a 3 month coding bootcamp. Before people get upset, yes, there are devs without a degree that know what they are doing.
- 9y ago

hodl 9y ago

Good tooling can save you a lot of googling mentioned here. Your editor should tell you the required order of arguments, for example.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Fradow 9y ago

One thing that saved my bacon is to write scripts that test production data is valid (for the few things that cannot be enforced by the DB, at least not easily). Invariably, those scripts found invalid data, which pointed to hard to spot bugs. Catching those early saved me from having huge amounts of invalid data to manually sort through.

hnarn 9y ago
Do you want to give a quick example?
- Fradow 9y ago
  Sure, let's say you have an organization, in which you have users and devices, so users and devices have a nullable FK to organization. Also, a device can be linked to a user, so a device has a nullable FK to a user. Now, when a device is linked to a user, both should be on the same organization, right? I don't see how to easily do that as a constraint (but I have to admit my SQL skills is quite low, and I avoid bypassing the ORM). Well, in production, devices might land somewhere else, and now you have a device that is supposed to be on organization A which is linked to a user on organization B, if you didn't force the organization when a device is linked to a user. Depending on your use case, it could be expected, an operational error, or something that should be resolved automatically. Edit: another example. We have a legacy system. Part of the data is supposed to be mirrored on both new and legacy system, via API calls (I don't know of a better way, I'm not a great dev, DB are different, not shared and on a different provider). Well, check if they are actually the same from time to time (at least the obvious stuff).
  - hnarn 9y ago
    >Now, when a device is linked to a user, both should be on the same organization, right? I don't see how to easily do that as a constraint I'm not exactly an expert when it comes to SQL either, but in this case wouldn't it be better if the "Device" table had two columns: "UserOwner" and "OrgOwner" which in turn have FK connections to "Users" and "Organizations". If the logic is that every device is only owned by a user or an org (never both) at any time, you could constrain: check(UserOwner is null or OrgOwner is null).

mnm1 9y ago

Not memorizing pointless shit (argument order, all function names, etc.) is actually a sign of a skilled developer who uses memory for important things, not things that can be looked up on Google in a second. Yes, if the Internet drops all productivity stops, but that's not because everyone needs to copy shit from stackoverflow every 2.5 seconds. Being able to develop without an Internet connection ... whoopty fucking do. Not impressive at all (unless you're trying to do well at a stupid whiteboarding interview) since without Internet, I'm pretty sure all work grinds to a halt and it's a ridiculous situation to prepare for. Why not code without computers (again, getting into the territory of beyond stupid interviewing here, the only place where this would be useful)? If you want to be a good developer, relying on memory and memorization for trivial things is a terrible use of your own inner resources as is trying to be productive in an environment without proper tools (no Internet / computer to work on).

saintPirelli 9y ago
Human memory doesn't work like your hard drive. The notion that you have some sort of 'free disk space', because you don't remember function names is ludicrous. Quite contrary, the more you train your memory, the more you can remember.
- mnm1 9y ago
  I didn't say it works like a hard drive. Yeah, the more I train, the more I remember what I trained and remembering function names and argument order is something I specifically don't want to do because I can only train my memory for so long each day and I'd rather remember important things, not trivial shit like that.
dotsh 9y ago
You know that before SO and Google all dev community was doing well? Using manuals and stuff that are typically on your machine from day one or from moment you install something you want to code in. Now it is: No Internet = No Coding. Then: No Internet = Who needs this shit?!

alkonaut 9y ago

This blog post has the paradoxal property that the act of writing seems to immediately contradict it. This person does not seem mediocre. He's humble, that goes a long way.

ggm 9y ago

I'd kill to be mediocre. Being a bad developer is my pinnacle achievement.

lowry 9y ago

#metoo

zaarn 9y ago

I would argue that OP isn't mediocre if they accept their faults. I also search on SO a lot ("how to check for string prefix in PHP" or my favorite "php variable reference"). A good programmer is someone who can see the architecture of a program when given a high-level description of the problem. Someone who I can realistically tell "write me a program to backup my files" and will end up writing a reasonable backup system. Someone who I can task with coming up with an application protocol with certain constraints. In short, someone who can be an artist, engineer or scientist depending on what is needed. Good practices are largely irrelevant to being a good developer, you can be a good dev writing spaghetti code and a bad dev using TDD and OOP.

ld00d 9y ago

As a more mediocre developer than the author, I would add that instead of copy-pasting code, you actually type it out. This makes it stick better for me.