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> 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

> 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. Could you elaborate on that? Maybe with an example of something that would fall into this "hack together in an afternoon" category? I am still a beginner with less than 5 years of professional experience, but usually there seem to be rather large overhead to putting together new projects/services and getting everything up an running. I can imagine being faster to proof of concepts in some environments (like a very involved framework - RoR/Django..), but not in others..

kragen 8y ago
Well, one night in 2007 I wrote a 3-D rendering engine in JS http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus and one Friday night in 2013 I wrote a raytracer in C http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytracer.html http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytra.... It took me until almost 4 AM, at which point I had reflection, color, and Lambertian shading from a tabular ASCII scene file format; a few days later I added procedural textures, a K-V-pair scene file format, specular highlights, and some more textures. One night last year I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/usql.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/usql.py, a toy SQL database supporting queries that join up to two tables. I would have implemented more of SQL, but I had set myself a two-hour time limit, and there isn't a parsing engine in the Python standard library. Last month I wrote a Mandelbrot set renderer in Python, but it was slow, so I rewrote it in Lua using LuaJIT, which made it extremely fast. That took less than an hour, but I subsequently added some more features to it, so it represents maybe a few hours of work now: https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/mand.lua https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/mand.lua (That one will only run on Linux right now, or MacOS with X11, because it uses my GUI library Yeso, which I haven't ported to Quartz or GDI yet. The others are portable.) aspmisc, dev3, and bubbleos are Git repos you can clone if you like. You may need to append /.git to the URL. Those were all purely programming exercises, not drawing on frameworks and libraries and whatnot beyond the very basic stuff that comes with the languages in question (and, in the Mandelbrot case, the Yeso library), but of course I've also learned how to use a bunch of tools; I can spin up a new React project with an Express server and get something working in an hour or two, I can hack together a visualization with D3 in minutes, I can spin up a test server on Bithost in a few minutes, I can import stuff into SQLite or LevelDB in a few minutes, I can write a website scraper using Beautiful Soup and urllib2 in half an hour or so, and so on. So if there's something that's easy to do in SQLite, I don't waste my time doing it the hard way in Python, and vice versa. I think there's enormous value in investing in tools like Docker to reduce the overhead in spinning up a new environment. There's also a lot to be said for improving low-level skills like typing, text editing, and writing and debugging simple code. It allows you to devote more attention, and more uninterrupted attention, to higher-level tasks like system design. But mostly programming more productively is not about writing code faster, although that sure helps; it's about writing less code.
- bbbobbb 7y ago
  Well, those are indeed impressive given the time you spent on them. I'll get back to you in 20 years to check if I got there.

kragen 8y ago

Well, one night in 2007 I wrote a 3-D rendering engine in JS http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/torus and one Friday night in 2013 I wrote a raytracer in C http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytracer.html http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/aspmisc/my-very-first-raytra.... It took me until almost 4 AM, at which point I had reflection, color, and Lambertian shading from a tabular ASCII scene file format; a few days later I added procedural textures, a K-V-pair scene file format, specular highlights, and some more textures. One night last year I wrote http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/usql.py http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/dev3/usql.py, a toy SQL database supporting queries that join up to two tables. I would have implemented more of SQL, but I had set myself a two-hour time limit, and there isn't a parsing engine in the Python standard library. Last month I wrote a Mandelbrot set renderer in Python, but it was slow, so I rewrote it in Lua using LuaJIT, which made it extremely fast. That took less than an hour, but I subsequently added some more features to it, so it represents maybe a few hours of work now: https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/mand.lua https://gitlab.com/kragen/bubbleos/blob/master/yeso/mand.lua (That one will only run on Linux right now, or MacOS with X11, because it uses my GUI library Yeso, which I haven't ported to Quartz or GDI yet. The others are portable.) aspmisc, dev3, and bubbleos are Git repos you can clone if you like. You may need to append /.git to the URL. Those were all purely programming exercises, not drawing on frameworks and libraries and whatnot beyond the very basic stuff that comes with the languages in question (and, in the Mandelbrot case, the Yeso library), but of course I've also learned how to use a bunch of tools; I can spin up a new React project with an Express server and get something working in an hour or two, I can hack together a visualization with D3 in minutes, I can spin up a test server on Bithost in a few minutes, I can import stuff into SQLite or LevelDB in a few minutes, I can write a website scraper using Beautiful Soup and urllib2 in half an hour or so, and so on. So if there's something that's easy to do in SQLite, I don't waste my time doing it the hard way in Python, and vice versa. I think there's enormous value in investing in tools like Docker to reduce the overhead in spinning up a new environment. There's also a lot to be said for improving low-level skills like typing, text editing, and writing and debugging simple code. It allows you to devote more attention, and more uninterrupted attention, to higher-level tasks like system design. But mostly programming more productively is not about writing code faster, although that sure helps; it's about writing less code.

bbbobbb 7y ago
Well, those are indeed impressive given the time you spent on them. I'll get back to you in 20 years to check if I got there.