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I'll be 30 fairly soon and am I the only one who doesn't find learning new technologies all that hard? Is it going to get harder soon? In my experience a datab

I'll be 30 fairly soon and am I the only one who doesn't find learning new technologies all that hard? Is it going to get harder soon? In my experience a database is a database, even if you call it something else. Really a database isn't too different from flat files with some helper functions to make rooting around them easier. In turn that's not to different from storing the information in RAM. Different ways to get at them but in the end you have the same bits in that string. Same with programming languages, I don't know the specific one you use perhaps but I move between C, Python, Javascript and Go without much friction (Jetbrains IDE's are helpful for when you forget specifics of syntax after a time away from a language). Sure I have to look up some how something is done in the standard library of one language vs another but I've gotten pretty quick at that. If I'm working on a existing codebase I can look how similar problems are solved and replicate that style. Containerization, Lamdba, serverless. It's the same old code running in new ways. I don't know what value to edit in the config file but that's just a google search away. At the end of the day its "I need to hit this endpoint and get this back" same story, different cast of characters. I don't mean to humblebrag or anything but it seems like a non-issue to me. I understand how computing systems work generally and the laws of physics impose some hard limitations that sort of massage any solution to look similar enough to any other that it isn't that hard to figure out what is going on. Sure I'll lack some of the deep knowledge that someone who has focused solely on these set of technologies may have but honestly most of the programmers I meet don't have that to begin with.

balfirevic 8y ago
> Is it going to get harder soon? I'm 34, so it might become different when I'm in my forties, but so far it's not getting any harder. Your summary below is spot on. > I understand how computing systems work generally and the laws of physics impose some hard limitations that sort of massage any solution to look similar enough to any other that it isn't that hard to figure out what is going on. Sure I'll lack some of the deep knowledge that someone who has focused solely on these set of technologies may have but honestly most of the programmers I meet don't have that to begin with.
seanmcdirmid 8y ago
The problem isn’t really learning the new technologies, but more finding the right projects to practice them with. As anyone knows (but especially experienced devs), simply learning something doesn’t convey much mastery, especially if you are used to more mastery than simply newbie levels.
jerf 8y ago
"I'll be 30 fairly soon and am I the only one who doesn't find learning new technologies all that hard? Is it going to get harder soon?" I'm 40, and it's easier than ever. I do get a bit pissy now when I have to spend a week learning some technology that I end up using for 15 minutes to do one thing, and then discard, but that's about it. (That has, unfortunately, happened.) But otherwise, it's easy. I've done non-trivial development now in languages that I don't even properly know, I just know all the surrounding languages and how to Google fast enough to make up for the rest. I will also get a bit pissy when I do one project over here and they're all in Ansible, and I do another project over here and it uses Salt, and then I tweak something over there and it's in Puppet, and then I have to help out over there and they're in Terraform + Docker + some home grown Compose thing that predates Compose, etc. That general category of things was a legit advancement and I prefer using them to what came before (in my world, nothing but precious snowflake servers), but I'm frustrated that I have to keep relearning the easy "surface syntax" stuff over and over again for what is almost the same exact task. I will also admit to a bit of impatience with the "re-inventing the wheel" phase of new technologies. For a recent example, the initial AWS "serverless" stuff (dumb name, inevitable idea) was written with like zero attention paid to the basic needs of source control, or the utter inevitability of how your service that was designed to have like 10 5-line scripts in it will be used to implement the next Amazon, so I stayed far away from it. Even now I'm not sure it's all that great. Docker I'm still not all that up on for somewhat similar reasons; for all the "innovation" in it it took years to be able to do basic things halfway properly. I'm definitely kind of done riding the cutting edge in the sense of chasing down communities that I can look at and tell are just going to be chasing their own tails for the next couple of years. Sometimes a tech community comes out led by a person or a team that has experience, though, and when that happens I'm all over it. Plus at this point there's literally so many things going on that nobody can keep up, not even the "young bucks". There is not a single person on this planet who is at expert level with all of the cream-of-the-crop Javascript frameworks, and there hasn't been in a long time. There's just too many now. When $YOUNG_GUY is up-to-date on 80% of the hot new shit and $OLD_GUY is sneering at it and up-to-date on 0% of it, back in the 1990s and such, yeah, $YOUNG_GUY might have an advantage. But when $YOUNG_GUY is up-to-date on 3% of the hot new shit and $OLD_GUY is up-to-date on 1.5% of it, and also knows a lot more stuff and can drop into a much wider array of projects and contribute (with the contribution being something other than "Let's rewrite all of this in $HOT_NEW_SHIT before we do anything else!"), the difference is far less extreme, even on the new tech's terms. Unsurprisingly, computer programming isn't such special and amazing stuff that, almost uniquely in all the fields of human endeavor, you're worse after doing it for 20 years than you were after doing it for 2. Other than cases where the body itself just breaks down, like professional-level sports, almost nothing works like that. I think it's a historical accident of some very unique circumstances in the 1990s that have lead anyone to believe programming is different. I think the idea has gone a long ways towards dissipating already, but has a long way to go yet, too.
burnallofit 8y ago
Not to knock your experience, but imho C, Python, and Javascript are the BASIC of modern programming languages. (I don't know about Go). Additionally, there are different levels of knowing a language. You can write perfectly workable programs in C without ever touching function pointers. So what's your level of mastery? And then there are more difficult languages. Have you tried C++ or Scala? Ever explored the esoterical intricacies of Java's type system? Lisp? Objective-C? Kotlin? ADA? Ok, that's languages. How about parallelism? Massive parallelism? Tight resource constraints such as limited memory? Error handling? Modern language and compiler design? I'm not trying to say you need to know all these things to be a decent coder. My point is there are many harder problems out there and maybe if you're bored you might want to try working on some of them.

balfirevic 8y ago

> Is it going to get harder soon? I'm 34, so it might become different when I'm in my forties, but so far it's not getting any harder. Your summary below is spot on. > I understand how computing systems work generally and the laws of physics impose some hard limitations that sort of massage any solution to look similar enough to any other that it isn't that hard to figure out what is going on. Sure I'll lack some of the deep knowledge that someone who has focused solely on these set of technologies may have but honestly most of the programmers I meet don't have that to begin with.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago

The problem isn’t really learning the new technologies, but more finding the right projects to practice them with. As anyone knows (but especially experienced devs), simply learning something doesn’t convey much mastery, especially if you are used to more mastery than simply newbie levels.

jerf 8y ago

"I'll be 30 fairly soon and am I the only one who doesn't find learning new technologies all that hard? Is it going to get harder soon?" I'm 40, and it's easier than ever. I do get a bit pissy now when I have to spend a week learning some technology that I end up using for 15 minutes to do one thing, and then discard, but that's about it. (That has, unfortunately, happened.) But otherwise, it's easy. I've done non-trivial development now in languages that I don't even properly know, I just know all the surrounding languages and how to Google fast enough to make up for the rest. I will also get a bit pissy when I do one project over here and they're all in Ansible, and I do another project over here and it uses Salt, and then I tweak something over there and it's in Puppet, and then I have to help out over there and they're in Terraform + Docker + some home grown Compose thing that predates Compose, etc. That general category of things was a legit advancement and I prefer using them to what came before (in my world, nothing but precious snowflake servers), but I'm frustrated that I have to keep relearning the easy "surface syntax" stuff over and over again for what is almost the same exact task. I will also admit to a bit of impatience with the "re-inventing the wheel" phase of new technologies. For a recent example, the initial AWS "serverless" stuff (dumb name, inevitable idea) was written with like zero attention paid to the basic needs of source control, or the utter inevitability of how your service that was designed to have like 10 5-line scripts in it will be used to implement the next Amazon, so I stayed far away from it. Even now I'm not sure it's all that great. Docker I'm still not all that up on for somewhat similar reasons; for all the "innovation" in it it took years to be able to do basic things halfway properly. I'm definitely kind of done riding the cutting edge in the sense of chasing down communities that I can look at and tell are just going to be chasing their own tails for the next couple of years. Sometimes a tech community comes out led by a person or a team that has experience, though, and when that happens I'm all over it. Plus at this point there's literally so many things going on that nobody can keep up, not even the "young bucks". There is not a single person on this planet who is at expert level with all of the cream-of-the-crop Javascript frameworks, and there hasn't been in a long time. There's just too many now. When $YOUNG_GUY is up-to-date on 80% of the hot new shit and $OLD_GUY is sneering at it and up-to-date on 0% of it, back in the 1990s and such, yeah, $YOUNG_GUY might have an advantage. But when $YOUNG_GUY is up-to-date on 3% of the hot new shit and $OLD_GUY is up-to-date on 1.5% of it, and also knows a lot more stuff and can drop into a much wider array of projects and contribute (with the contribution being something other than "Let's rewrite all of this in $HOT_NEW_SHIT before we do anything else!"), the difference is far less extreme, even on the new tech's terms. Unsurprisingly, computer programming isn't such special and amazing stuff that, almost uniquely in all the fields of human endeavor, you're worse after doing it for 20 years than you were after doing it for 2. Other than cases where the body itself just breaks down, like professional-level sports, almost nothing works like that. I think it's a historical accident of some very unique circumstances in the 1990s that have lead anyone to believe programming is different. I think the idea has gone a long ways towards dissipating already, but has a long way to go yet, too.

burnallofit 8y ago

Not to knock your experience, but imho C, Python, and Javascript are the BASIC of modern programming languages. (I don't know about Go). Additionally, there are different levels of knowing a language. You can write perfectly workable programs in C without ever touching function pointers. So what's your level of mastery? And then there are more difficult languages. Have you tried C++ or Scala? Ever explored the esoterical intricacies of Java's type system? Lisp? Objective-C? Kotlin? ADA? Ok, that's languages. How about parallelism? Massive parallelism? Tight resource constraints such as limited memory? Error handling? Modern language and compiler design? I'm not trying to say you need to know all these things to be a decent coder. My point is there are many harder problems out there and maybe if you're bored you might want to try working on some of them.