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I spend a fair amount of time on HN. Among many, I think this article is probably the most succinct endictment of ADHD-ridden "modern" web programming/ecosyste

by r3vrse 8y ago

I spend a fair amount of time on HN. Among many, I think this article is probably the most succinct endictment of ADHD-ridden "modern" web programming/ecosystem practices I've read. It's so sad to me that while the name dropping and churn for frameworks and languages continues, frenzied and unabated -- basic (pun sort of intended) analysis and problem-solving techniques go out the proverbial window. Why learn to think critically when you can just 'npm update', fix 37 broken dependencies, and write a blog post about it? Right?

onion2k 8y ago
Critical thinking is a learned skill. For most developers it comes with experience, and many developers in startups are often yet to learn it. Thinking well under pressure is even harder. This is more a problem about startups using inexperienced developers than anything related to what they're building or which tech they're using.
- cube2222 8y ago
  Indeed, if your building anything, good metrics are one of the most important things. Didn't see them having any metrics apart of Google analytics.
- projektir 8y ago
  And most companies not knowing how to measure experience, so they pass over experienced devs and can't understand their value...
- bsaul 8y ago
  It comes with experience, but also with more senior devs explaining it to you. Seing someone use firebase to save paiements, then recompute a total from a collection, and as a consequence having its system explodes with less than one session per second, means everybody in the team drank the « let’s use this nosql google shiny tech, it’s so cool » cool aid. Even one conversation with any senior dev having some kind of experience with backend development would have asked about expected load, types of queries, data model, etc. And concluded that storing paiements was probably the least interesting scenario for using a tech like firebase.
douglaswlance 8y ago
This is the result of top-down learning. You learn the very latest tech and work your way down to the metal as required. Bottom-up learning starts at the metal, at the very fundamentals of computation, and builds upward.

by r3vrse 8y ago

onion2k 8y ago

Critical thinking is a learned skill. For most developers it comes with experience, and many developers in startups are often yet to learn it. Thinking well under pressure is even harder. This is more a problem about startups using inexperienced developers than anything related to what they're building or which tech they're using.

cube2222 8y ago
Indeed, if your building anything, good metrics are one of the most important things. Didn't see them having any metrics apart of Google analytics.
projektir 8y ago
And most companies not knowing how to measure experience, so they pass over experienced devs and can't understand their value...
bsaul 8y ago
It comes with experience, but also with more senior devs explaining it to you. Seing someone use firebase to save paiements, then recompute a total from a collection, and as a consequence having its system explodes with less than one session per second, means everybody in the team drank the « let’s use this nosql google shiny tech, it’s so cool » cool aid. Even one conversation with any senior dev having some kind of experience with backend development would have asked about expected load, types of queries, data model, etc. And concluded that storing paiements was probably the least interesting scenario for using a tech like firebase.

douglaswlance 8y ago

This is the result of top-down learning. You learn the very latest tech and work your way down to the metal as required. Bottom-up learning starts at the metal, at the very fundamentals of computation, and builds upward.