41 ms·

Programming: Doing it more vs. doing it better

367 points by lonesword 8y ago

seba_dos1 8y ago
> Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice. Well, three years is really not a lot when it comes to developing an intuition. Just enough to grasp some basics. > a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people Yeah, I seem to recall Douglas Adams saying that the easier it is to read a text, the harder it was to write it. At the beginning of my career I was constantly being praised for how fast I work. Well, I did stuff that worked, the effects were quickly visible, everyone was happy. Even though there were code reviews to weed out the ugliest stuff, I wouldn't want to go back and maintain that software today :P
- leggomylibro 8y ago
  It might just be one of those universal truths: you need to understand something very well to explain how it works in simple terms. Or as some smart person once said, "brevity is the soul of wit."
  - flukus 8y ago
    "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" - attributed to just about everyone: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
  - pvh 8y ago
    The character who speaks that line (Polonius) says so in the midst of a rambling and contradictory monologue, though we can certainly give Shakespeare credit for coining it.
skybrian 8y ago
I suspect there may be better ways to practice, rather than just doing it more? Some people put effort into memorization of commonly used idioms. Here's another dubious analogy: when learning music, you do need to practice, but playing a song all the way through a bunch of times is a rather inefficient way to practice it.
- munchbunny 8y ago
  Create your own mental frameworks. For example (personal mnemonic to cover my own blind spots) when designing my feature, consider: * Flighting, especially protocol changes, will this change cause clients to be unable to talk to services? * Risk: if this change breaks its service, what else breaks? What is the recovery path? * Security: does this unintentionally relax or circumvent existing security boundaries? How much damage can an abuse of any code that writes/modifies do? This is not a complete list on purpose. I use it to shore up the things I tend to forget to think about.
- megous 8y ago
  Other way of doing it more, is not just doing the same/similar thing again and again, but writing/reading large amount of very different programs. One day you do web app, other day you write a kernel driver, third day you write a scraping app, fourth day you write a tunel driver to get networking over USB, fifth day you reverse engineer some random piece of HW you have laying around and write alternative firmware for it to teach it new things, and so on. (it may not be days :)) Each of these things will branch out into different areas. You may need to write a text parser. You may need to design a USB protocol to relay packets. You may need to learn a processor architecture, calling convention, assembler mnemonics. Over time you'll gain a lot of knowledge and you may be able to cross-apply plenty of it accross the domain boundaries.
- sinuhe69 8y ago
  I believe it’s almost identical to other fields: review, revise and reflection is the best way to learn. If someone want to improve his code quality, he should continuously review his code, best together with a “better” programmer. After finding the weak spots of his code, he should try to improve them by himself. To do so, he need to learn from good examples, exploring the reason behind through computer literature and experienced coders. After achieving a better version, he should reflect on his practice, how he might come to the solution himself in the first place, why did he choose the first solution and very soon he will start to recognize certain patterns. Regarding technical expertise, he should find where the challenge lies and start studying and practicing to make the knowledge sticks. He should go out of his comfort zone, challenge his ability and make mistakes. That is the only way to mastery.
tschellenbach 8y ago
For me the best analogy is a carpenter tightening screws. When you start out solving a particular problem part of the scope and required functionality is always not 100% clear. So you start out with an implementation which favors flexibility over things such as DRY or performant. As you learn more about the problem you start to optimize. One of the biggest mistakes (the biggest one is probably not writing tests) I see junior engineers make is trying to optimize before fully understanding the required functionality.
mamon 8y ago
>> The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. By that metric George R.R. Martin is on track to be the greatest writer of all the time :)
- felipemnoa 8y ago
  Nah. He just got distracted by the trappings of being famous.
  - mamon 8y ago
    No, he had written himself into a corner at the end of the "Dance of Dragons", and then waited for the tv show screenwriters to help him figure out how to proceed from there - that's the most probable explanation I can come up with (hinted by some statements from his interviews).
    - ColanR 8y ago
      I think he's also putting it off because nobody's going to talk about him once the series is finished, and he can't bear to lose the attention.
    - portroyal 8y ago
      I think HBO just made it way easier. Once I heard the series would be a show, I knew we'd never get any more books because the lull between A Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons was something like 5 years. At that rate, he'd need another 15 to be done while gallivanting on other fantasy titles/collections/anthologies/wtf and endorsing everything under the sun once the first three books gave him clout. I'm definitely a little bitter about it, but I've accepted it. Parris needs the royalties. /salt: Somehow, within that time, Robin Hobb managed to spit out a trilogy seemingly once a quarter. Thankfully, Steven Erikson came along and wrote The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which, if you like books, honestly puts ASoIaF to shame on numerous levels (and has the benefit of being done).
- mac01021 8y ago
temdbej 8y ago
Part of me feels like bootcamps are effective for some because you will inevitably start getting it when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time (which is more than you’d likely do on the job or in a more theoretical CS degree)
- toomuchequate 8y ago
  >when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time Does this happen? I've programmed daily for ~11 hours/day between 2 companies, but at 15hrs/day I feel like there is diminishing returns.
  - opportune 8y ago
    Why 11hr/day?
revskill 8y ago
I use one rule: If it's easy to remove, then it's fine. Because only then, i don't fear refactoring later. So i'll get my goal: Easy refactoring for fun and profit. Refactoring is often underrated. Actually i learnt more from refactoring rather than "just make it work perfectly since day 1.
- qlk1123 8y ago
  This reminds me the talk: https://maximilianhoffmann.com/talks/programming/the-art-of-destroying-software https://maximilianhoffmann.com/talks/programming/the-art-of-...
- ravenstine 8y ago
  Most people talk about KISS, DRY, and YAGNI, but it's uncommon that I meet anyone who actually values replaceability. I don't even mind some repetition of code so long as groups of code aren't tightly-coupled and parts of an application can be easily replaced with rewritten versions. I had a boss once who was dumbfounded that I actually wanted to refactor code. I guess a lot of people want to write things "perfect" from the very start, but that perfection seems to be a delusion most of the time. The best way to know perfection is to see it in hindsight.
  - d4mi3n 8y ago
    This line of discussion reminds me of a great quote by Sandi Metz, who's pretty well known in the ruby community for harping on the topic. One thing I saw in a talk of hers that really stuck with me: Repetition is preferable to the wrong abstraction. The first thing that's drilled into a new programmer is DRY. It's easy to understand and it works reasonably well. The next step up seems to be knowing when _not_ to roll stuff up, and how to tell when you're looking at a distinct piece of logic that needs to be reified into it's own entity or function. EDIT: The Sandi Metz talk I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
  - Ma8ee 8y ago
    The main problem with repetion of code is that someone always forgets to change in at least one place when the requirements change. It's more about having only one place where the logic is defined than anything else.
kragen 8y ago
Someone who's been programming for three years is still a beginner, even though based on what he wrote here, Kevin is almost certainly a lot better than I was when I'd been programming for only three years. I do find that a lot of programming stuff that used to be hard is easier for me now that I've been progrmaming for 38 years. But that doesn't mean I spend all my time doing things I can do without thinking, and it certainly doesn't mean I write code that doesn't need refactoring. Maybe my designs are better than they used to be — I think so — but often that's because I developed the design more incrementally through refactoring, rather than less incrementally by planning. I do avoid a lot of errors by thinking through the consequences of a choice before taking action, in a way that I couldn't always do. But often that choice is specifically the choice to plan out a big design at the start of a project. Also, though, what counts as "big" has changed for me. What I can hack together in an afternoon now might have taken me a week ten or fifteen years ago. So I can explore alternatives with less risk, in a way. The author describes a lot of anxiety and guilt about doing things imperfectly. I think that's a big obstacle to improvement — other people can pick up on that and will be reluctant to give you feedback, and feedback from other people is a really fast way to improve. Also, it tends to shunt you into tasks that don't challenge you enough — it pushes you to avoid risk, and pushes other people to not ask you to do things that are at the limit of your abilities. This is precisely the dynamic Atwood was trying to combat by telling his story.
- segmondy 8y ago
  Someone programming for 3 yrs is not a beginner, There are people programming at 3 yrs that are experts and will run circles around you and your 38 years. Some people really have the talent and put in the work to get good. In 2019, the mentorship is available via means of books, blogs, MOOC, youtube videos, conferences. What some folks can achieve in 3 yrs these days is really unbelievable. P/S, I have been hacking around the computer for 25yrs and think I'm a pretty good programmer too. But I have been impressed by some 2 yrs old & 3 yrs old experiences.
  - hhs 8y ago
    Interesting view. I'm learning, with about 8 months worth of knowledge and experience, and this is useful. Did you notice any skills/traits in those people who were "unbelievable" in those 3 years? For instance, did they do "test driven development"? Also, did they keep good log habits?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
segmondy 8y ago
BTW, for anyone who wants to know more about the context, it's from the book "Art & Fear"
LarryMade2 8y ago
I think when you are starting some new concept, that you are learning as you go you need to just try to do your best of throwing stuff on the wall to get it to work, refactor a lot and keep grinding away. During this time you are building the "Big picture" of what it is. Once you get a good enough big picture then you probably will start to realize where how to optimize the data and create better methods, but even there it still never stops, you now know the system, and can figure out what you need from the technology to construct a better platform. The databases I've worked with for over 20 years have evolved as I have added more functionality, I have been able to identify where the priorities were as well as how to make it function more dynamically. I didn't really get the big picture for a decade as they were sill doing part of it analog and only requested (revealed to me) more functionality as the system grew more capable. You may think you know it all now, but I would think there's still a lot more road to be covered after only three years.
- flocial 8y ago
  This was my first thought. I think beginners take better to volume but eventually we all hit a wall that takes more deliberate practice and deep reflection. Even then some concepts will be out of reach or take an exceptional teacher to break down. That doesn't even touch on the limits of individual abilities which we all face at some point.
innocentoldguy 8y ago
> Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice. I used to think I’d get to the point where I could just sit down and breathe out perfect code, but that doesn’t happen. As I’ve thought about the reasons why, I came up with the following reasons: 1. Writing code is an act of inventing. If what I’m trying to build already existed, I could just go buy it and save myself a lot of time and money. It doesn’t exist though. I’m being paid to create something new and unique. This requires thought, trial and error, and multiple iterations to get right. 2. The software development landscape is not a static one. I used to build commercial buildings with my dad. Once I learned that studs should be set at 16” on center, how to measure and cut complex angles, and how to finish cement, I never had to learn those things again. They were pretty much static and I got to where I could breathe out a plumbed wall without thinking about it. In the software industry, developers are constantly having to learn new things. New languages become popular, companies jump on things like Kubernetes because everyone else is, the JavaScript community cranks out new libraries and frameworks on almost a daily basis. While the fundamentals of recursion, looping, and conditionals remain the same, the syntax, idioms, and best practices are constantly shifting. After 30 years of programming, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being an apprentice in at least some aspects of my career.
- djmips 8y ago
  Sometimes I wished I was a baker or a carpenter.
  - innocentoldguy 8y ago
    I do too, until payday.
externalreality 8y ago
Programming is simple. Domains and interfaces are difficult. People over engineer stuff. People like to think they found the key to hidden wisdom. I believe I just summed up 90% of the difficulty with programming. Just for the record procedural programming and functional programming are the only two styles of programming to me that make sense. Procedural because its how the machine model works and functional because its how a mathematical description of computation works. WTF is OOP (how the over active imagination of a child works I would reckon).
- osrec 8y ago
  OOP attempts to map to real objects, (and sometimes not so real objects). I know it's hated by functional purists, but it really does make it easier to think through problems. I personally don't hate it.
  - externalreality 8y ago
    Functional purists are the only one's who hate it. OOP by its very nature encourages developers to make bold abstractions prematurely (where prematurely is interchangeable with unnecessarily) and subjectively. Mean while the procedural programmer (Golang) has already finished the segment of the program having written one big function. If a piece of that big function is needed elsewhere she factors it out. Most of her program are simple loops and conditionals. Programs are easy. Programs are easy, why complicate something that is easy. The machine should also guide the programmer as much as possible. I wish Golang had refinement types like Liquid Haskell or ATS. Some simple static analysis to cut down on crufty slow runtime test suites.
    - true_religion 8y ago
      Nothing stops someone from waiting till they hit a pian point before refactoring during OOP. It's how I work. But then again I mostly use Python and JavaScript which are multi paradigm so perhaps my mental model had evolved because of that.
    - Bekwnn 8y ago
overgard 8y ago
I really disagree with this. There's a point on most projects where you've learned about all you're going to learn from it. Maybe it's still growing, but it might not be teaching you anything new. The best way to get good is diversity of experience, and the best way to get diversity of experience is to do a lot of different things. The more diversity you can pack into a smaller time space (without just cramming and rushing things), the faster you'll get good. If you've only been programming 3 years, you're definitely going to make a lot of mistakes. That's good! That means you're pushing your boundaries and learning. Peer review feedback isn't a mark of shame; and being attached to your code is a _bad_ thing. At the end of the day, coders vastly overvalue code beauty and aesthetics, and overestimate how long their code is really going to live. (I've been a professional for about 11 years, and while I take pride in my work, a lot of the companies I worked for either folded, pivoted to a new product, replaced some of the things I wrote with open source solutions after the problem space had become less novel and a proprietary solution didn't make sense anymore, or a billion other reasons why the code didn't need to live anymore. I'm not saying that's an excuse to write shabby code, but a lot of times "it works and it solves the problem at hand and the code isn't a disaster" is when you should stop working on it). I think coding is a lot more like creative writing than it is like engineering, and if you want to get good at creative writing you make a point of writing a lot of stories, even though a lot of them won't be good. Or if you're composing music, you write a lot of music, you don't focus on one piece forever. Anything where you make, the more you make, the quicker you get better at it.
sinuhe69 8y ago
I think one word would shed light on such anecdotes: deliberate practice. Countless literature and researches have pointed out that simply doing more would not bring much improvement but find out what is missing and practice it to perfection then move to another weaknesses is the best way to achieve top performance, be it in sport, in music or other fields. Like someone who want to learn chess; simply plays a lot each and every day will improve his ELO slowly but it will stall after a while (say at the level of a club player) and he can almost certainly never attain the mastery. In opposite, someone who seeks guidance, study and practice to fix his weaknesses and perfect his technique will improve vastly more in the same amount of time. Effective practice and coaching is also the only difference between merely very good players and grand masters. I can’t imagine why it should be different in the field of programming and software engineering. Someone who writes thousands sloppy games might have learned how to do them faster (and maybe better) but he still learned nothing more about complex systems or secure systems. Only with intense study and practice he can master such stuffs effectively. The Talent Code of Coyle is a good book to start reading about deliberate practice.
- tekkk 8y ago
  Yes, exactly this. If you never really think about your coding seriously, and ponder where you should get better at and then do it - you'll never improve! Simply by acknowledging your own mistakes and how you could fix them in the future, let's you build up skill much better than just churning out code day in day out without giving it a second thought. I've seen the both extremes, the programmers who are so serious about the style of the code that nothing really satisfies them (and consequently progress happens at snail's pace). Then I've seen those, who'll write the ugliest of hacks just to get the thing working and move on. I think there's a deliberate balance between the two, where you feel you're not wasting time on useless things but actually get something done, which you can then comfortably show to your peers without beginning to blush. And only way of getting there is practise and being mindful of what you are doing. Similar to sports, music - whatever. To know where and how you did wrong is key, often you'll need a very good teacher to show you that. Criticizing yourself works too, but often you either become too strict to yourself or too lenient. Just starting to code without worrying if this is the "best practise" or not will allow you get into a flow which is much better than over-thinking your approach. Because once you start to do it, like a good warm-up it allows you to see the problem much clearer as you become aware of the problems as you encounter them. Then if you have time, you might want to refactor your solution or just move on the next most important thing. Sometimes it's better to just write awful code to get to that MVP or other important milestone, only after which you start to review your code. Experience will tell you, when is the right time to move fast and when it's good to slow down and enforce a particular paradigm to your codebase. From purely
lifeisstillgood 8y ago
Please stop thinking there are 10x programmers - or perhaps stop thinking it means 10x better. It is simply 10x more valuable. And that depends on the organisation you work for, the state of the code base and so on. Look at it this way - sports stars are regularly 10x, 100x more valuable to their team management than A.N.Other professional player. Take football (soccer) - Ronaldo is a waaaay better player than I am easily 100x, but take the newest signing in league 3 or whatever it is - can Ronaldo run 10x as much, is he 10x as likely to put in a penalty or a free kick? No. it's probably not even a question of twice as likely - it's percentages better. It's just that those percentages matter when the cup is on the line. I am sure that Baseball statistics probably show this - the spread from top of the league to bottom is unlikely to be 10x more runs scored So more and more it's worth remembering that the value provided to an organisation (and remember that's what you can charge for) is based not on your intrinsic qualities but what you can do for them in their current state.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  Small percentages matter when the game is competitive. Programming is not competitive. I agree with your argument but I think your analogy is bad.
  - taeric 8y ago
    Such is the life of analogies.
  - ralusek 8y ago
    How on earth is programming not competitive? Coming up with the wrong data model can result in millions of dollars in technical debt, a failure to fully realize a product, or certainly allow a competitor to win out. Bad programmers can structure a product so poorly that it is simply unpleasant to work on, and you won't be able to hire or retain engineers. I think moreso than most careers, a single software engineer is capable of a tremendous amount of good or harm.
    - laughinghan 8y ago
wchildhn 8y ago
This is why there are so many vulnerable products in the market and engineers are tired of fixing them. People do not think before they start and they are confident enough to say that they have learned from their faults when they are actually too tired to complete the fixing process.
derpherpsson 8y ago
I spent my first 4 years after the university at a company with very little quality control. We had to talk the bosses into having code reviews. When we began having code reviews my older colleagues never complained about anything - everything went through. That truly was quantity over quality. Oftentimes I had to wade through piece-of-shit code that really made my soul hurt. Really. Bad. But in hindsight that was good. It's good to have spent 4 years ONLY writing code 8 hours straight 5 days a week. But I never, ever, want to go back to anything like that.
- photonios 8y ago
  This mirrors my experience. I spend the first two years of my career working somewhere where pretty much everything went through. There were some projects in the company lead by developers that were some of the best I ever worked with. They upheld very high standards and the code was some of the best I've seen. Most projects were a total mess and nobody asked questions or reviewed code. I worked on both type of projects. I think it really helped me. Some projects I just wrote code hours and hours on end without little regard to quality, but later on other projects within the company I was exposed to people and code that was significantly better.
jondubois 8y ago
I've been coding intensively for more than half of my life from a young age - I'm approaching 16 years of experience now. Also, I've been doing it quite intensively (I was writing games when I was still in school before studying software engineering at university, then I worked for 14 different companies; some startups and some corporations in about 10 different industries. I've completed projects in at least 7 different programming languages). Also I've always been working on a side project during nights and weekends; mostly open source. I have mixed feelings about the ceramics anecdote because I've met some people who have been coding a long time and producing large quanities of code but it's not good quality. To write high quality code, you need to enjoy the process and be adaptable. You need to have been exposed to a lot of different kinds of projects and management cultures. Also, the most frustrating thing is that other people who are not good coders don't recognize straight away who is a good coder. Often, it takes a whole year to prove yourself. However, good coders usually know straight away who a good coder is. Because of this effect, our industry is currently in a bad state. Many of the big popular tech stacks are mediocre compared to some of the alternatives that are available. There is a lot of misinformation and misplaced hype. Most people who have the power to make hiring decisions are not sufficiently good at coding to be making those decisions. So good coders tend to find themselves smothered in most work environments...
- passivepinetree 8y ago
  Can you elaborate on your opinions about frameworks? What are some tech stacks that are mediocre, and why are they mediocre? What makes an alternative better?
topmonk 8y ago
I'm surprised the author didn't mention learning about programming. Programming did come out of the field of computer science, after all. Not that I think one should never do any hands on practice, but if you spend a large chunk of time learning the concepts of different mathematical fields related to programming, as well as the teaching of other programmers, you'll become a much better programmer than you ever could otherwise.
tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
Interesting. I've "evolved" in exactly the opposite way. I used to go for quality all the time. Nowadays I'm pretty confident getting things done swiftly (and thus enabling more code/design iterations) works better for me in both the short and the long term. That being said, I definitely don't pretend to be the Thomas Mann of software engineering.
lazyjones 8y ago
People who want to write "beautiful code" are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive. Listen to the people who finish correct programs on time, or mostly working prototypes in hours or days. How to recognise the former group: they obsess about coding and other standards and processes, plan and discuss too long how to implement something (plan what to implement, do it, then improve it when it's done; inspiration comes from working on something, not from thinking about it) and never even meet their own estimates for how long it'll take them to deliver. They will tell you they are taking so long because they haven't decided yet how to best implement something, but they don't even have a straightforward implementation (there's always one). If they were truly concerned with "the best way", they'd have several solutions implemented already, together with metrics and benchmarks. They haven't, because they're vain impostors and not capable programmers.
- rvanmil 8y ago
  I think it’s a balance. At the other end of the spectrum are the “cowboys” who are productive by writing sloppy code with bad architecture and are either oblivious of or just ignore the huge pile of technical debt they pass along to the people who get to maintain their code.
  - varjag 8y ago
    Take a "perfectionist", and you end up having all that atop of nothing actually yet running in production.
  - lazyjones 8y ago
    Technical debt within a working codebase is a much, much better problem to have than not being able to launch or even demonstrate your product. It's really overrated. I left a huge pile of it in my previous company (amassed over 18 years of programming in Perl) and guess what: it's doing great, more profitable than ever before. The code has been slowly enhanced, some of it refactored. Code quality (as in "beauty", not correctness) is the least of your problems in a startup, although it will look bigger for those who have to work on it (pity them but don't overemphasize).
rejschaap 8y ago
> “Refactoring code” would be something left to the apprentice, not something that I, the master who has churned out enough ceramic pots, would be bothered with. The master potter does not churn out pots that need to be fixed. He focuses on quantity to get to quality faster, that is the whole point of that story in my opinion. Also, "refactoring code" should not be seen as such a separate activity that it can (or should) be done by other people.
thanhhaimai 8y ago
I think we’re conflating learning and producing when we discuss quantity and quality. During learning time, quantity is what you want to focus on. During work mode, you want to slow down and think carefully. Only when you are very sure about the selected solution that you start going quickly. Applying the story of James Joyce in a broad stroke might be misguided. If I have to pick, I’d err on the side of doing more than trying to slow down and write perfect code. When you’re junior, your definition of “perfect” code might be very different from others’. You might be reinforcing bad habits rather than learning. I’ve seen junior SWEs insist on spending hours eliminating a couple lines of duplicated code by pulling them out into functions to achieve their perfect code. At the same time, they neglect basic coding hygiene, put defensive nullptr checks everywhere, and not design for readability and testing.
ensiferum 8y ago
For learning, produce as much as possible. For production, produce as little as possible.
muzani 8y ago
I've been facing this in the past year after I started doubling my consulting rates. A part of me wanted to do 2x better work as well, and that just ended up in getting less work and lower quality work done. Taking my sweet time is definitely not productive either. I find the balance is to treat it like sketching. Instead of trying to "print" out code, well designed from scratch, from top to bottom. It's better to sketch out the main "lines" of it. It involves a lot of erasing past lines and old code, or even making redundant code at times. You definitely need a lot of scaffolding and placeholders, especially early on.
alexgmcm 8y ago
The author has another blog post about learning to play the violin and how it taught him the importance of deliberate practice which I feel is probably what he is also trying to get across in this post. I am experiencing something similar as I continue to study the classical guitar. I agree that the importance of deliberate practice over just coding and coding really does matter - in my day job I will write many lines of code doing the same string processing etc. (I work in Data Science) but when I am trying to learn I really want to think if I am doing it in a Pythonic way, how I might make the code more reusable and so on.
averros 8y ago
It's very easy: most coders are undisciplined hackers, not engineers. Unfortunately the prevalent macho coder culture (agile, and the rest of that crap along the lines of "move fast break things") positively encourages hacking away without much planning, design, or forethought. Real engineers spend most of their time learning, thinking, designing, and planning. Coding for them is mostly exercise for fingers, something which needs to be done but ultimately providing no challenge. They learned not only from textbooks but also from their own mistakes, and know what to watch for and where to double-check themselves. The outcomes are strikingly different: code produced by real engineers usually simply works. No need to babysit it in production. It also solves the real problem rather than "improving" on something which was adequate in the first place (face it: most new software replacing the older one is worse - more bloat, more bugs, harder to use). The real engineer understands that complexity is THE enemy, and breeding (or dragging in) unnecessary complexity is a hallmark of a freaking amateur. Oh, and academia doesn't teach engineering. Your C.S. degree means shit. Old codgers who remember punching cards and incantations like //GO.SYSIN DD * may be tired of learning the shiny new toys and aren't up to the speed on the latest jargon, but over the years of wrangling code they acquired wisdom, and you'd be very well advised to listen to them.
- bitblit87 8y ago
  I think labelling a development methodology and macho or not engineering is disingenuous. Any methodology practiced without an engineering mindset looks like that. Agile methodologies practiced by engineers looks like good engineering.
  - averros 8y ago
    Methodology shmethodology. No management fad can replace thinking. Boeing 737 MAX is what you get when scrum masters get to boss around engineers.
radosc 8y ago
I do not believe the ceramics story. It is either nice fake to prove the point or what that particular teacher valued was a natural expression rather than perfection. Applying that principle to photography would mean that every one of us is now an artist because we made 1000s of vacation photos and photographers that used just film cameras are bound to produce lower quality work. I've also seen many startups that generated a lot of low-quality code that became a tech debt super fast, and all it needed is someone stopping the line and rethinking the whole thing.
Dowwie 8y ago
One prolific programmer who comes to mind from this article is Nikolay Kim, author of the Actix projects in Rust, aiohttp in Python, and many other open source projects. The Actix Project has evolved so much over a short period of time. The author learns by doing, with haste.
pojzon 8y ago
I think that being a professional is exactly that: "Being able to balance those two core things to meet client needs." Any kind of extremisms is bad, no matter where applied.
weeber 8y ago
Doing it more can provide better result only when it is allowed to trash the previous iterations to use the latest one. This is not the case in the industry, we cannot change everything in a product at each iteration. This is why at least a little care and architecture have to be done before doing it and trashing must be made with care.
paxpelus 8y ago
I have worked many times on ugly and on beautiful code. What I consider ugly is not always ugly for other developers and the other way around.
edpichler 8y ago
This is interesting reading. Continuous Delivery fits perfectly on this idea of continuous building and learning.
kriro 8y ago
Write more, care about your craft in general terms. Then it'll get better. It's a skill, skills get better with more practice. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.
werber 8y ago
I've had this conversation a million times. I think when you're learning and working on your own to build a skill, do it fast and do it over and over. When you're working on a shared code base, you need to be more cognizant of your actions, of maintaining the established styles and conventions. I've know very few 10x or 100x programmers, and am not one myself. But I have had to deal with people who sacrificed quality for speed and every time a code review for those kind of people comes my way, I know I'm in for a ride that will take me away from the work I need to be doing.
3pt14159 8y ago
This article is good, but these conversations here on HN always bug me. Yes—write a ton of code.[0] Just do it. Make your favourite couple languages extensions of yourself. Yes—think through your code really clearly. Spend a day on your migration or other data-structure altering changes. They're going to echo throughout your whole application and, ultimately, organization. [0] The closer you get to the API, the faster you should code. Not the interface definition itself, that should be thought through, but the code that responds to a call to the interface. The serializer, the part of the controller that calls the render, these parts are easy. Just roll them out. The models and migrations are much more important. Spend time there. It's not an all or nothing thing.
jnty 8y ago
People used to heavily criticise Minecraft from a technical point of view. Their criticisms were often entirely reasonable - it was at one point a very inefficient and unstable piece of software. However, it's now the second best-selling game of all time. Sometimes it's better to churn out a release and fix the problems later than let quality worries block you from achieving anything.
saint_abroad 8y ago
The point as applies to individuals extends to projects also: > Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built. > [...] plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)
ken 8y ago
As one of the million people who tried to read Ulysses and failed, I'm not sure I'd hold up Joyce as the example of what programmers should aspire to. There's plenty of popular and even good creative works which were written quickly or even under external time pressure.
pier25 8y ago
FYI the ceramics story comes from a book called "Art and Fear" which I highly recommend to any creative individual.
gumby 8y ago
This is why programming (as a profession) is engineering and is different computer science (as it is today -- when I was a student 40 years ago it was still turning into a "science"). Engineering as a discipline is at its heart balancing tradeoffs of factors like time, cost, weight, strength, efficiency etc. There is no single pole on any of these axes that can dominate, even though for illustrative purposes it's generally useful to do so when writing an essay. (Also three years is a really short time, though the author seems to be using that time well in order to learn and meta-learn).
wayfarer2s 8y ago
I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem. James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting. The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.
WangYekun 8y ago
I think second is good
WangYekun 8y ago
I think to second is good.

367 points by lonesword 8y ago

> Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice. Well, three years is really not a lot when it comes to developing an intuition. Just enough to grasp some basics. > a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people Yeah, I seem to recall Douglas Adams saying that the easier it is to read a text, the harder it was to write it. At the beginning of my career I was constantly being praised for how fast I work. Well, I did stuff that worked, the effects were quickly visible, everyone was happy. Even though there were code reviews to weed out the ugliest stuff, I wouldn't want to go back and maintain that software today :P

leggomylibro 8y ago
It might just be one of those universal truths: you need to understand something very well to explain how it works in simple terms. Or as some smart person once said, "brevity is the soul of wit."
- flukus 8y ago
  "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter" - attributed to just about everyone: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/04/28/shorter-letter/
- pvh 8y ago
  The character who speaks that line (Polonius) says so in the midst of a rambling and contradictory monologue, though we can certainly give Shakespeare credit for coining it.

skybrian 8y ago

I suspect there may be better ways to practice, rather than just doing it more? Some people put effort into memorization of commonly used idioms. Here's another dubious analogy: when learning music, you do need to practice, but playing a song all the way through a bunch of times is a rather inefficient way to practice it.

munchbunny 8y ago
Create your own mental frameworks. For example (personal mnemonic to cover my own blind spots) when designing my feature, consider: * Flighting, especially protocol changes, will this change cause clients to be unable to talk to services? * Risk: if this change breaks its service, what else breaks? What is the recovery path? * Security: does this unintentionally relax or circumvent existing security boundaries? How much damage can an abuse of any code that writes/modifies do? This is not a complete list on purpose. I use it to shore up the things I tend to forget to think about.
megous 8y ago
Other way of doing it more, is not just doing the same/similar thing again and again, but writing/reading large amount of very different programs. One day you do web app, other day you write a kernel driver, third day you write a scraping app, fourth day you write a tunel driver to get networking over USB, fifth day you reverse engineer some random piece of HW you have laying around and write alternative firmware for it to teach it new things, and so on. (it may not be days :)) Each of these things will branch out into different areas. You may need to write a text parser. You may need to design a USB protocol to relay packets. You may need to learn a processor architecture, calling convention, assembler mnemonics. Over time you'll gain a lot of knowledge and you may be able to cross-apply plenty of it accross the domain boundaries.
sinuhe69 8y ago
I believe it’s almost identical to other fields: review, revise and reflection is the best way to learn. If someone want to improve his code quality, he should continuously review his code, best together with a “better” programmer. After finding the weak spots of his code, he should try to improve them by himself. To do so, he need to learn from good examples, exploring the reason behind through computer literature and experienced coders. After achieving a better version, he should reflect on his practice, how he might come to the solution himself in the first place, why did he choose the first solution and very soon he will start to recognize certain patterns. Regarding technical expertise, he should find where the challenge lies and start studying and practicing to make the knowledge sticks. He should go out of his comfort zone, challenge his ability and make mistakes. That is the only way to mastery.

tschellenbach 8y ago

For me the best analogy is a carpenter tightening screws. When you start out solving a particular problem part of the scope and required functionality is always not 100% clear. So you start out with an implementation which favors flexibility over things such as DRY or performant. As you learn more about the problem you start to optimize. One of the biggest mistakes (the biggest one is probably not writing tests) I see junior engineers make is trying to optimize before fully understanding the required functionality.

mamon 8y ago

>> The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. By that metric George R.R. Martin is on track to be the greatest writer of all the time :)

felipemnoa 8y ago
Nah. He just got distracted by the trappings of being famous.
- mamon 8y ago
  No, he had written himself into a corner at the end of the "Dance of Dragons", and then waited for the tv show screenwriters to help him figure out how to proceed from there - that's the most probable explanation I can come up with (hinted by some statements from his interviews).
  - ColanR 8y ago
    I think he's also putting it off because nobody's going to talk about him once the series is finished, and he can't bear to lose the attention.
  - portroyal 8y ago
    I think HBO just made it way easier. Once I heard the series would be a show, I knew we'd never get any more books because the lull between A Feast for Crows and Dance with Dragons was something like 5 years. At that rate, he'd need another 15 to be done while gallivanting on other fantasy titles/collections/anthologies/wtf and endorsing everything under the sun once the first three books gave him clout. I'm definitely a little bitter about it, but I've accepted it. Parris needs the royalties. /salt: Somehow, within that time, Robin Hobb managed to spit out a trilogy seemingly once a quarter. Thankfully, Steven Erikson came along and wrote The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which, if you like books, honestly puts ASoIaF to shame on numerous levels (and has the benefit of being done).
mac01021 8y ago

temdbej 8y ago

Part of me feels like bootcamps are effective for some because you will inevitably start getting it when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time (which is more than you’d likely do on the job or in a more theoretical CS degree)

toomuchequate 8y ago
>when you do it for 15+ hours a day every day for an extended period of time Does this happen? I've programmed daily for ~11 hours/day between 2 companies, but at 15hrs/day I feel like there is diminishing returns.
- opportune 8y ago
  Why 11hr/day?

revskill 8y ago

I use one rule: If it's easy to remove, then it's fine. Because only then, i don't fear refactoring later. So i'll get my goal: Easy refactoring for fun and profit. Refactoring is often underrated. Actually i learnt more from refactoring rather than "just make it work perfectly since day 1.

qlk1123 8y ago
This reminds me the talk: https://maximilianhoffmann.com/talks/programming/the-art-of-destroying-software https://maximilianhoffmann.com/talks/programming/the-art-of-...
ravenstine 8y ago
Most people talk about KISS, DRY, and YAGNI, but it's uncommon that I meet anyone who actually values replaceability. I don't even mind some repetition of code so long as groups of code aren't tightly-coupled and parts of an application can be easily replaced with rewritten versions. I had a boss once who was dumbfounded that I actually wanted to refactor code. I guess a lot of people want to write things "perfect" from the very start, but that perfection seems to be a delusion most of the time. The best way to know perfection is to see it in hindsight.
- d4mi3n 8y ago
  This line of discussion reminds me of a great quote by Sandi Metz, who's pretty well known in the ruby community for harping on the topic. One thing I saw in a talk of hers that really stuck with me: Repetition is preferable to the wrong abstraction. The first thing that's drilled into a new programmer is DRY. It's easy to understand and it works reasonably well. The next step up seems to be knowing when _not_ to roll stuff up, and how to tell when you're looking at a distinct piece of logic that needs to be reified into it's own entity or function. EDIT: The Sandi Metz talk I mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE
- Ma8ee 8y ago
  The main problem with repetion of code is that someone always forgets to change in at least one place when the requirements change. It's more about having only one place where the logic is defined than anything else.

kragen 8y ago

Someone who's been programming for three years is still a beginner, even though based on what he wrote here, Kevin is almost certainly a lot better than I was when I'd been programming for only three years. I do find that a lot of programming stuff that used to be hard is easier for me now that I've been progrmaming for 38 years. But that doesn't mean I spend all my time doing things I can do without thinking, and it certainly doesn't mean I write code that doesn't need refactoring. Maybe my designs are better than they used to be — I think so — but often that's because I developed the design more incrementally through refactoring, rather than less incrementally by planning. I do avoid a lot of errors by thinking through the consequences of a choice before taking action, in a way that I couldn't always do. But often that choice is specifically the choice to plan out a big design at the start of a project. Also, though, what counts as "big" has changed for me. What I can hack together in an afternoon now might have taken me a week ten or fifteen years ago. So I can explore alternatives with less risk, in a way. The author describes a lot of anxiety and guilt about doing things imperfectly. I think that's a big obstacle to improvement — other people can pick up on that and will be reluctant to give you feedback, and feedback from other people is a really fast way to improve. Also, it tends to shunt you into tasks that don't challenge you enough — it pushes you to avoid risk, and pushes other people to not ask you to do things that are at the limit of your abilities. This is precisely the dynamic Atwood was trying to combat by telling his story.

segmondy 8y ago
Someone programming for 3 yrs is not a beginner, There are people programming at 3 yrs that are experts and will run circles around you and your 38 years. Some people really have the talent and put in the work to get good. In 2019, the mentorship is available via means of books, blogs, MOOC, youtube videos, conferences. What some folks can achieve in 3 yrs these days is really unbelievable. P/S, I have been hacking around the computer for 25yrs and think I'm a pretty good programmer too. But I have been impressed by some 2 yrs old & 3 yrs old experiences.
- hhs 8y ago
  Interesting view. I'm learning, with about 8 months worth of knowledge and experience, and this is useful. Did you notice any skills/traits in those people who were "unbelievable" in those 3 years? For instance, did they do "test driven development"? Also, did they keep good log habits?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

segmondy 8y ago

BTW, for anyone who wants to know more about the context, it's from the book "Art & Fear"

LarryMade2 8y ago

I think when you are starting some new concept, that you are learning as you go you need to just try to do your best of throwing stuff on the wall to get it to work, refactor a lot and keep grinding away. During this time you are building the "Big picture" of what it is. Once you get a good enough big picture then you probably will start to realize where how to optimize the data and create better methods, but even there it still never stops, you now know the system, and can figure out what you need from the technology to construct a better platform. The databases I've worked with for over 20 years have evolved as I have added more functionality, I have been able to identify where the priorities were as well as how to make it function more dynamically. I didn't really get the big picture for a decade as they were sill doing part of it analog and only requested (revealed to me) more functionality as the system grew more capable. You may think you know it all now, but I would think there's still a lot more road to be covered after only three years.

flocial 8y ago
This was my first thought. I think beginners take better to volume but eventually we all hit a wall that takes more deliberate practice and deep reflection. Even then some concepts will be out of reach or take an exceptional teacher to break down. That doesn't even touch on the limits of individual abilities which we all face at some point.

innocentoldguy 8y ago

> Three years later, I am still very much the apprentice. I used to think I’d get to the point where I could just sit down and breathe out perfect code, but that doesn’t happen. As I’ve thought about the reasons why, I came up with the following reasons: 1. Writing code is an act of inventing. If what I’m trying to build already existed, I could just go buy it and save myself a lot of time and money. It doesn’t exist though. I’m being paid to create something new and unique. This requires thought, trial and error, and multiple iterations to get right. 2. The software development landscape is not a static one. I used to build commercial buildings with my dad. Once I learned that studs should be set at 16” on center, how to measure and cut complex angles, and how to finish cement, I never had to learn those things again. They were pretty much static and I got to where I could breathe out a plumbed wall without thinking about it. In the software industry, developers are constantly having to learn new things. New languages become popular, companies jump on things like Kubernetes because everyone else is, the JavaScript community cranks out new libraries and frameworks on almost a daily basis. While the fundamentals of recursion, looping, and conditionals remain the same, the syntax, idioms, and best practices are constantly shifting. After 30 years of programming, I don’t think I’ll ever stop being an apprentice in at least some aspects of my career.

djmips 8y ago
Sometimes I wished I was a baker or a carpenter.
- innocentoldguy 8y ago
  I do too, until payday.

externalreality 8y ago

Programming is simple. Domains and interfaces are difficult. People over engineer stuff. People like to think they found the key to hidden wisdom. I believe I just summed up 90% of the difficulty with programming. Just for the record procedural programming and functional programming are the only two styles of programming to me that make sense. Procedural because its how the machine model works and functional because its how a mathematical description of computation works. WTF is OOP (how the over active imagination of a child works I would reckon).

osrec 8y ago
OOP attempts to map to real objects, (and sometimes not so real objects). I know it's hated by functional purists, but it really does make it easier to think through problems. I personally don't hate it.
- externalreality 8y ago
  Functional purists are the only one's who hate it. OOP by its very nature encourages developers to make bold abstractions prematurely (where prematurely is interchangeable with unnecessarily) and subjectively. Mean while the procedural programmer (Golang) has already finished the segment of the program having written one big function. If a piece of that big function is needed elsewhere she factors it out. Most of her program are simple loops and conditionals. Programs are easy. Programs are easy, why complicate something that is easy. The machine should also guide the programmer as much as possible. I wish Golang had refinement types like Liquid Haskell or ATS. Some simple static analysis to cut down on crufty slow runtime test suites.
  - true_religion 8y ago
    Nothing stops someone from waiting till they hit a pian point before refactoring during OOP. It's how I work. But then again I mostly use Python and JavaScript which are multi paradigm so perhaps my mental model had evolved because of that.
  - Bekwnn 8y ago

overgard 8y ago

I really disagree with this. There's a point on most projects where you've learned about all you're going to learn from it. Maybe it's still growing, but it might not be teaching you anything new. The best way to get good is diversity of experience, and the best way to get diversity of experience is to do a lot of different things. The more diversity you can pack into a smaller time space (without just cramming and rushing things), the faster you'll get good. If you've only been programming 3 years, you're definitely going to make a lot of mistakes. That's good! That means you're pushing your boundaries and learning. Peer review feedback isn't a mark of shame; and being attached to your code is a _bad_ thing. At the end of the day, coders vastly overvalue code beauty and aesthetics, and overestimate how long their code is really going to live. (I've been a professional for about 11 years, and while I take pride in my work, a lot of the companies I worked for either folded, pivoted to a new product, replaced some of the things I wrote with open source solutions after the problem space had become less novel and a proprietary solution didn't make sense anymore, or a billion other reasons why the code didn't need to live anymore. I'm not saying that's an excuse to write shabby code, but a lot of times "it works and it solves the problem at hand and the code isn't a disaster" is when you should stop working on it). I think coding is a lot more like creative writing than it is like engineering, and if you want to get good at creative writing you make a point of writing a lot of stories, even though a lot of them won't be good. Or if you're composing music, you write a lot of music, you don't focus on one piece forever. Anything where you make, the more you make, the quicker you get better at it.

sinuhe69 8y ago

I think one word would shed light on such anecdotes: deliberate practice. Countless literature and researches have pointed out that simply doing more would not bring much improvement but find out what is missing and practice it to perfection then move to another weaknesses is the best way to achieve top performance, be it in sport, in music or other fields. Like someone who want to learn chess; simply plays a lot each and every day will improve his ELO slowly but it will stall after a while (say at the level of a club player) and he can almost certainly never attain the mastery. In opposite, someone who seeks guidance, study and practice to fix his weaknesses and perfect his technique will improve vastly more in the same amount of time. Effective practice and coaching is also the only difference between merely very good players and grand masters. I can’t imagine why it should be different in the field of programming and software engineering. Someone who writes thousands sloppy games might have learned how to do them faster (and maybe better) but he still learned nothing more about complex systems or secure systems. Only with intense study and practice he can master such stuffs effectively. The Talent Code of Coyle is a good book to start reading about deliberate practice.

tekkk 8y ago
Yes, exactly this. If you never really think about your coding seriously, and ponder where you should get better at and then do it - you'll never improve! Simply by acknowledging your own mistakes and how you could fix them in the future, let's you build up skill much better than just churning out code day in day out without giving it a second thought. I've seen the both extremes, the programmers who are so serious about the style of the code that nothing really satisfies them (and consequently progress happens at snail's pace). Then I've seen those, who'll write the ugliest of hacks just to get the thing working and move on. I think there's a deliberate balance between the two, where you feel you're not wasting time on useless things but actually get something done, which you can then comfortably show to your peers without beginning to blush. And only way of getting there is practise and being mindful of what you are doing. Similar to sports, music - whatever. To know where and how you did wrong is key, often you'll need a very good teacher to show you that. Criticizing yourself works too, but often you either become too strict to yourself or too lenient. Just starting to code without worrying if this is the "best practise" or not will allow you get into a flow which is much better than over-thinking your approach. Because once you start to do it, like a good warm-up it allows you to see the problem much clearer as you become aware of the problems as you encounter them. Then if you have time, you might want to refactor your solution or just move on the next most important thing. Sometimes it's better to just write awful code to get to that MVP or other important milestone, only after which you start to review your code. Experience will tell you, when is the right time to move fast and when it's good to slow down and enforce a particular paradigm to your codebase. From purely

lifeisstillgood 8y ago

Please stop thinking there are 10x programmers - or perhaps stop thinking it means 10x better. It is simply 10x more valuable. And that depends on the organisation you work for, the state of the code base and so on. Look at it this way - sports stars are regularly 10x, 100x more valuable to their team management than A.N.Other professional player. Take football (soccer) - Ronaldo is a waaaay better player than I am easily 100x, but take the newest signing in league 3 or whatever it is - can Ronaldo run 10x as much, is he 10x as likely to put in a penalty or a free kick? No. it's probably not even a question of twice as likely - it's percentages better. It's just that those percentages matter when the cup is on the line. I am sure that Baseball statistics probably show this - the spread from top of the league to bottom is unlikely to be 10x more runs scored So more and more it's worth remembering that the value provided to an organisation (and remember that's what you can charge for) is based not on your intrinsic qualities but what you can do for them in their current state.

skrebbel 8y ago
Small percentages matter when the game is competitive. Programming is not competitive. I agree with your argument but I think your analogy is bad.
- taeric 8y ago
  Such is the life of analogies.
- ralusek 8y ago
  How on earth is programming not competitive? Coming up with the wrong data model can result in millions of dollars in technical debt, a failure to fully realize a product, or certainly allow a competitor to win out. Bad programmers can structure a product so poorly that it is simply unpleasant to work on, and you won't be able to hire or retain engineers. I think moreso than most careers, a single software engineer is capable of a tremendous amount of good or harm.
  - laughinghan 8y ago

wchildhn 8y ago

This is why there are so many vulnerable products in the market and engineers are tired of fixing them. People do not think before they start and they are confident enough to say that they have learned from their faults when they are actually too tired to complete the fixing process.

derpherpsson 8y ago

I spent my first 4 years after the university at a company with very little quality control. We had to talk the bosses into having code reviews. When we began having code reviews my older colleagues never complained about anything - everything went through. That truly was quantity over quality. Oftentimes I had to wade through piece-of-shit code that really made my soul hurt. Really. Bad. But in hindsight that was good. It's good to have spent 4 years ONLY writing code 8 hours straight 5 days a week. But I never, ever, want to go back to anything like that.

photonios 8y ago
This mirrors my experience. I spend the first two years of my career working somewhere where pretty much everything went through. There were some projects in the company lead by developers that were some of the best I ever worked with. They upheld very high standards and the code was some of the best I've seen. Most projects were a total mess and nobody asked questions or reviewed code. I worked on both type of projects. I think it really helped me. Some projects I just wrote code hours and hours on end without little regard to quality, but later on other projects within the company I was exposed to people and code that was significantly better.

jondubois 8y ago

I've been coding intensively for more than half of my life from a young age - I'm approaching 16 years of experience now. Also, I've been doing it quite intensively (I was writing games when I was still in school before studying software engineering at university, then I worked for 14 different companies; some startups and some corporations in about 10 different industries. I've completed projects in at least 7 different programming languages). Also I've always been working on a side project during nights and weekends; mostly open source. I have mixed feelings about the ceramics anecdote because I've met some people who have been coding a long time and producing large quanities of code but it's not good quality. To write high quality code, you need to enjoy the process and be adaptable. You need to have been exposed to a lot of different kinds of projects and management cultures. Also, the most frustrating thing is that other people who are not good coders don't recognize straight away who is a good coder. Often, it takes a whole year to prove yourself. However, good coders usually know straight away who a good coder is. Because of this effect, our industry is currently in a bad state. Many of the big popular tech stacks are mediocre compared to some of the alternatives that are available. There is a lot of misinformation and misplaced hype. Most people who have the power to make hiring decisions are not sufficiently good at coding to be making those decisions. So good coders tend to find themselves smothered in most work environments...

passivepinetree 8y ago
Can you elaborate on your opinions about frameworks? What are some tech stacks that are mediocre, and why are they mediocre? What makes an alternative better?

topmonk 8y ago

I'm surprised the author didn't mention learning about programming. Programming did come out of the field of computer science, after all. Not that I think one should never do any hands on practice, but if you spend a large chunk of time learning the concepts of different mathematical fields related to programming, as well as the teaching of other programmers, you'll become a much better programmer than you ever could otherwise.

tdsamardzhiev 8y ago

Interesting. I've "evolved" in exactly the opposite way. I used to go for quality all the time. Nowadays I'm pretty confident getting things done swiftly (and thus enabling more code/design iterations) works better for me in both the short and the long term. That being said, I definitely don't pretend to be the Thomas Mann of software engineering.

lazyjones 8y ago

People who want to write "beautiful code" are not role models, don't listen to them. They are vain and not productive. Listen to the people who finish correct programs on time, or mostly working prototypes in hours or days. How to recognise the former group: they obsess about coding and other standards and processes, plan and discuss too long how to implement something (plan what to implement, do it, then improve it when it's done; inspiration comes from working on something, not from thinking about it) and never even meet their own estimates for how long it'll take them to deliver. They will tell you they are taking so long because they haven't decided yet how to best implement something, but they don't even have a straightforward implementation (there's always one). If they were truly concerned with "the best way", they'd have several solutions implemented already, together with metrics and benchmarks. They haven't, because they're vain impostors and not capable programmers.

rvanmil 8y ago
I think it’s a balance. At the other end of the spectrum are the “cowboys” who are productive by writing sloppy code with bad architecture and are either oblivious of or just ignore the huge pile of technical debt they pass along to the people who get to maintain their code.
- varjag 8y ago
  Take a "perfectionist", and you end up having all that atop of nothing actually yet running in production.
- lazyjones 8y ago
  Technical debt within a working codebase is a much, much better problem to have than not being able to launch or even demonstrate your product. It's really overrated. I left a huge pile of it in my previous company (amassed over 18 years of programming in Perl) and guess what: it's doing great, more profitable than ever before. The code has been slowly enhanced, some of it refactored. Code quality (as in "beauty", not correctness) is the least of your problems in a startup, although it will look bigger for those who have to work on it (pity them but don't overemphasize).

rejschaap 8y ago

> “Refactoring code” would be something left to the apprentice, not something that I, the master who has churned out enough ceramic pots, would be bothered with. The master potter does not churn out pots that need to be fixed. He focuses on quantity to get to quality faster, that is the whole point of that story in my opinion. Also, "refactoring code" should not be seen as such a separate activity that it can (or should) be done by other people.

thanhhaimai 8y ago

I think we’re conflating learning and producing when we discuss quantity and quality. During learning time, quantity is what you want to focus on. During work mode, you want to slow down and think carefully. Only when you are very sure about the selected solution that you start going quickly. Applying the story of James Joyce in a broad stroke might be misguided. If I have to pick, I’d err on the side of doing more than trying to slow down and write perfect code. When you’re junior, your definition of “perfect” code might be very different from others’. You might be reinforcing bad habits rather than learning. I’ve seen junior SWEs insist on spending hours eliminating a couple lines of duplicated code by pulling them out into functions to achieve their perfect code. At the same time, they neglect basic coding hygiene, put defensive nullptr checks everywhere, and not design for readability and testing.

ensiferum 8y ago

For learning, produce as much as possible. For production, produce as little as possible.

muzani 8y ago

I've been facing this in the past year after I started doubling my consulting rates. A part of me wanted to do 2x better work as well, and that just ended up in getting less work and lower quality work done. Taking my sweet time is definitely not productive either. I find the balance is to treat it like sketching. Instead of trying to "print" out code, well designed from scratch, from top to bottom. It's better to sketch out the main "lines" of it. It involves a lot of erasing past lines and old code, or even making redundant code at times. You definitely need a lot of scaffolding and placeholders, especially early on.

alexgmcm 8y ago

The author has another blog post about learning to play the violin and how it taught him the importance of deliberate practice which I feel is probably what he is also trying to get across in this post. I am experiencing something similar as I continue to study the classical guitar. I agree that the importance of deliberate practice over just coding and coding really does matter - in my day job I will write many lines of code doing the same string processing etc. (I work in Data Science) but when I am trying to learn I really want to think if I am doing it in a Pythonic way, how I might make the code more reusable and so on.

averros 8y ago

It's very easy: most coders are undisciplined hackers, not engineers. Unfortunately the prevalent macho coder culture (agile, and the rest of that crap along the lines of "move fast break things") positively encourages hacking away without much planning, design, or forethought. Real engineers spend most of their time learning, thinking, designing, and planning. Coding for them is mostly exercise for fingers, something which needs to be done but ultimately providing no challenge. They learned not only from textbooks but also from their own mistakes, and know what to watch for and where to double-check themselves. The outcomes are strikingly different: code produced by real engineers usually simply works. No need to babysit it in production. It also solves the real problem rather than "improving" on something which was adequate in the first place (face it: most new software replacing the older one is worse - more bloat, more bugs, harder to use). The real engineer understands that complexity is THE enemy, and breeding (or dragging in) unnecessary complexity is a hallmark of a freaking amateur. Oh, and academia doesn't teach engineering. Your C.S. degree means shit. Old codgers who remember punching cards and incantations like //GO.SYSIN DD * may be tired of learning the shiny new toys and aren't up to the speed on the latest jargon, but over the years of wrangling code they acquired wisdom, and you'd be very well advised to listen to them.

bitblit87 8y ago
I think labelling a development methodology and macho or not engineering is disingenuous. Any methodology practiced without an engineering mindset looks like that. Agile methodologies practiced by engineers looks like good engineering.
- averros 8y ago
  Methodology shmethodology. No management fad can replace thinking. Boeing 737 MAX is what you get when scrum masters get to boss around engineers.

radosc 8y ago

I do not believe the ceramics story. It is either nice fake to prove the point or what that particular teacher valued was a natural expression rather than perfection. Applying that principle to photography would mean that every one of us is now an artist because we made 1000s of vacation photos and photographers that used just film cameras are bound to produce lower quality work. I've also seen many startups that generated a lot of low-quality code that became a tech debt super fast, and all it needed is someone stopping the line and rethinking the whole thing.

Dowwie 8y ago

One prolific programmer who comes to mind from this article is Nikolay Kim, author of the Actix projects in Rust, aiohttp in Python, and many other open source projects. The Actix Project has evolved so much over a short period of time. The author learns by doing, with haste.

pojzon 8y ago

I think that being a professional is exactly that: "Being able to balance those two core things to meet client needs." Any kind of extremisms is bad, no matter where applied.

weeber 8y ago

Doing it more can provide better result only when it is allowed to trash the previous iterations to use the latest one. This is not the case in the industry, we cannot change everything in a product at each iteration. This is why at least a little care and architecture have to be done before doing it and trashing must be made with care.

paxpelus 8y ago

I have worked many times on ugly and on beautiful code. What I consider ugly is not always ugly for other developers and the other way around.

edpichler 8y ago

This is interesting reading. Continuous Delivery fits perfectly on this idea of continuous building and learning.

kriro 8y ago

Write more, care about your craft in general terms. Then it'll get better. It's a skill, skills get better with more practice. Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

werber 8y ago

I've had this conversation a million times. I think when you're learning and working on your own to build a skill, do it fast and do it over and over. When you're working on a shared code base, you need to be more cognizant of your actions, of maintaining the established styles and conventions. I've know very few 10x or 100x programmers, and am not one myself. But I have had to deal with people who sacrificed quality for speed and every time a code review for those kind of people comes my way, I know I'm in for a ride that will take me away from the work I need to be doing.

3pt14159 8y ago

This article is good, but these conversations here on HN always bug me. Yes—write a ton of code.[0] Just do it. Make your favourite couple languages extensions of yourself. Yes—think through your code really clearly. Spend a day on your migration or other data-structure altering changes. They're going to echo throughout your whole application and, ultimately, organization. [0] The closer you get to the API, the faster you should code. Not the interface definition itself, that should be thought through, but the code that responds to a call to the interface. The serializer, the part of the controller that calls the render, these parts are easy. Just roll them out. The models and migrations are much more important. Spend time there. It's not an all or nothing thing.

jnty 8y ago

People used to heavily criticise Minecraft from a technical point of view. Their criticisms were often entirely reasonable - it was at one point a very inefficient and unstable piece of software. However, it's now the second best-selling game of all time. Sometimes it's better to churn out a release and fix the problems later than let quality worries block you from achieving anything.

saint_abroad 8y ago

The point as applies to individuals extends to projects also: > Programming system builders have also been exposed to this lesson, but it seems to have not yet been learned. Project after project designs a set of algorithms and then plunges into construction of customer-deliverable software on a schedule that demands delivery of the first thing built. > [...] plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow. Fred Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (1975)

ken 8y ago

As one of the million people who tried to read Ulysses and failed, I'm not sure I'd hold up Joyce as the example of what programmers should aspire to. There's plenty of popular and even good creative works which were written quickly or even under external time pressure.

pier25 8y ago

FYI the ceramics story comes from a book called "Art and Fear" which I highly recommend to any creative individual.

gumby 8y ago

This is why programming (as a profession) is engineering and is different computer science (as it is today -- when I was a student 40 years ago it was still turning into a "science"). Engineering as a discipline is at its heart balancing tradeoffs of factors like time, cost, weight, strength, efficiency etc. There is no single pole on any of these axes that can dominate, even though for illustrative purposes it's generally useful to do so when writing an essay. (Also three years is a really short time, though the author seems to be using that time well in order to learn and meta-learn).

wayfarer2s 8y ago

I'm surprised the author's takeaway from the Joyce quote was disillusionment. He's actually quite close to the secret sauce. I don't think writing more code and ending up with less code are at odds. In fact, I think you need to write more code to end up with less. You write more code in order to understand the problem space. Once you understand the problem space, you can then refactor everything that you wrote into more concise code that more accurately reflects the problem. James Joyce wrote Ulysses at the rate of a hundred words per day if you only consider the finished product. However, I doubt every word that Joyce wrote ended up in Ulysses. I'm sure he did quite a lot of cutting and rewriting. The takeaway from me from the two quoted stories was that quality and quantity are not at odds, but instead are the yin and yang of productivity. They reinforce each other. The more things you produce, the more patterns you are exposed to which in turn leads to higher quality since experience leads to efficiency, giving you more time to get things right.

WangYekun 8y ago

I think second is good

WangYekun 8y ago

I think to second is good.