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My own three things: 1. It's much easier to figure out something by looking at code samples, other people's code than reading documentation. 2. Clever one lin
by superasn 8y ago
My own three things:
1. It's much easier to figure out something by looking at code samples, other people's code than reading documentation.
2. Clever one line code doesn't look very clever 3 to 6 months down the line and often leads to what was i thinking moments.
3. Perfectionism including premature optimisation is the progremer's biggest enemy.
Bonus: programming doesn't make you money, marketing it does.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> Bonus: programming doesn't make you money, marketing it does. This one I find the hardest to accept out of pretty much any advice I've ever read on HN. All rational evidence points towards this being true, and yet all my being, all the ethics I have, scream loudly that it ought not to be so.
- kristjansson 8y agoIf it helps, I don’t think that’s a statement of the relative value of programmers and marketers, but a statement of necessary conditions - a great marketer without a product is pretty pointless, and beautiful code sitting unused is pretty worthless.
- TeMPOraL 8y agoMy point is: just look at the Ask HN thread of yesterday - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047553 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18047553. Look at the marketing tips. Half of them make me feel dirty just from even considering them.
- mercer 8y agoI've found that leaning into the "I do not care for marketing myself or negotiating, but I'm expensive by default" approach can work, but it requires a degree of being overtly and brazenly 'idiosyncratic'/odd that I find uncomfortable because it still feels like marketing myself. But it's often better than the alternative. People like stereotypes, basically, and I'm trying to (sparingly) lean into the 'autist programmer' stereotype even if it sometimes feels like 'hamming it up'. EDIT: specifically, it means I dress down to a fault with some clients, let my inner geek out at 'social events', get too technical if I know there's someone present who can translate and 'explain me', etc. Whether this behavior is just another form of manipulation and self-marketing, or just undoing years of trying to mask my 'true nature' is something I often contemplate.
- CM30 8y agoCan't agree more with these points. The first one is basically why the original documentation for WordPress worked so well. Say what you like about the software or its questionable code quality, but almost every page of documentation had a neat example or two that people could tweak to figure out a function or class or what not. What's more, if you look at most overly well used pieces of software for development purposes, you'll notice that almost all the popular/beginner friendly ones do the same thing. jQuery, Bootstrap, React... every one of them has documentation filled with simple examples. And for the last one, you could even expand on it a bit more and say '[name of skill] doesn't make you money, marketing it does'. Because at the end of the day, it's not just programming in which this is the case. It's anything from art to writing to design to creating any form of media. You don't need to be good to succeed in any of these fields, you just need to be 'okay' enough that you can deliver something and marketing savvy enough to sell it to an audience. Not realising this has likely sunk thousands of startups and companies, and understanding it has propelled many poorly done ones/outright scam artists to fame and fortune.