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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 ti

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.
  - sjapkee 9y ago
    If all your work is to read/write data from DB and represent it in different ways, then yes, you can know absolutely nothing, use standard framework functions and be stackoverflow developer 8/5. But if you need to write something specific, something more complex, you can't just take two functions from your %framework_name% and make it beautiful and working. You should know how to do it and furthermore, you should know how to do it with existing tools. And here the majority begin to have problems.
    - didymospl 9y ago
      Well, it really depends what do you mean by "something more complex". I remember when the author of rather non-trivial tool used by many of HN users went on Twitter rant because he could not invert a binary tree and failed a whiteboard interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 To me, and possibly most CS freshmen, this task would be a piece of cake, yet I think Max is a better programmer than most of us - a.k.a. rockstar developer.
      - sjapkee 9y ago
        Something more complex is like audio/video codecs, image compression, etc. When they are developed, existing algorithms and libraries cover, at best, half of the needs. That's what I'm talking about. There almost isn't exist areas where you can use only existing code base and feel good with it.
        didymospl 9y ago
        I assume you're absolutely right about the areas you mentioned but it's not something that an average developer works on nowadays. In the same way as the majority of professional drivers are not race drivers.
        sjapkee 9y ago
        Fraud detection, billing systems, infosec, banking, HFT, image/video processing and pattern recognition, games development, firmware, highload tools and services, tools for programmers (IDEs, linters, etc.), programming languages design, browsers, search systems, data processing and storage systems, electronic document management, cryptosystems, operating systems, frameworks, etc. It seems to me that this is a large part of the software being developed right now. And the development of all this requires rather non-trivial knowledge and skills. So your comparison with the race drivers is quite far from the truth.
- pyjammas 9y ago
  I disagree. Programming is about whatever the particular case is about. In some cases that can be about 'working algorithms', but in other cases it can be about building a CRUD app and knowing the nuances of front-end development concerns (including, sometimes, CSS quirks and the like). I find many discussions about these issues tiresome because they feel like someone arguing that 'writing', in general, is about grammar, or vocabulary, or style, or whatnot. It's about all these things, and none of these things, depending on the context.
Kurtz79 9y ago
I think the concept is the same as Socrates's "The first step towards wisdom is recognizing your own ignorance".

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.
- sjapkee 9y ago
  If all your work is to read/write data from DB and represent it in different ways, then yes, you can know absolutely nothing, use standard framework functions and be stackoverflow developer 8/5. But if you need to write something specific, something more complex, you can't just take two functions from your %framework_name% and make it beautiful and working. You should know how to do it and furthermore, you should know how to do it with existing tools. And here the majority begin to have problems.
  - didymospl 9y ago
    Well, it really depends what do you mean by "something more complex". I remember when the author of rather non-trivial tool used by many of HN users went on Twitter rant because he could not invert a binary tree and failed a whiteboard interview https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9695102 To me, and possibly most CS freshmen, this task would be a piece of cake, yet I think Max is a better programmer than most of us - a.k.a. rockstar developer.
    - sjapkee 9y ago
      Something more complex is like audio/video codecs, image compression, etc. When they are developed, existing algorithms and libraries cover, at best, half of the needs. That's what I'm talking about. There almost isn't exist areas where you can use only existing code base and feel good with it.
      - didymospl 9y ago
        I assume you're absolutely right about the areas you mentioned but it's not something that an average developer works on nowadays. In the same way as the majority of professional drivers are not race drivers.
        sjapkee 9y ago
        Fraud detection, billing systems, infosec, banking, HFT, image/video processing and pattern recognition, games development, firmware, highload tools and services, tools for programmers (IDEs, linters, etc.), programming languages design, browsers, search systems, data processing and storage systems, electronic document management, cryptosystems, operating systems, frameworks, etc. It seems to me that this is a large part of the software being developed right now. And the development of all this requires rather non-trivial knowledge and skills. So your comparison with the race drivers is quite far from the truth.
pyjammas 9y ago
I disagree. Programming is about whatever the particular case is about. In some cases that can be about 'working algorithms', but in other cases it can be about building a CRUD app and knowing the nuances of front-end development concerns (including, sometimes, CSS quirks and the like). I find many discussions about these issues tiresome because they feel like someone arguing that 'writing', in general, is about grammar, or vocabulary, or style, or whatnot. It's about all these things, and none of these things, depending on the context.

Kurtz79 9y ago

I think the concept is the same as Socrates's "The first step towards wisdom is recognizing your own ignorance".