6 ms·

Programming isn't unique in allowing you swing between moods of "this feels great :D" and "I'm so dumb". (I think most people feel like either at times, even ho

Programming isn't unique in allowing you swing between moods of "this feels great :D" and "I'm so dumb". (I think most people feel like either at times, even hours apart). But Fred Brooks makes a good point with: """The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures.... Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. […] The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be."""

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
When I started my first programming job the CEO told me that programming is 59 minutes of feeling like an idiot and 1 minute of feeling like a genius. It's really stuck with me, and has so far proven true.
- sesuximo 6y ago
  59:1 is pretty good. Sometimes debugging gets me really down
  - shrimp_emoji 6y ago
    That's when you hack and slash and debug by friction. : p Forging ahead thoughtfully, incrementally, and modularly balances the ratio a lo--oh hey a foreign codebase designed in an overengineered byzantine Lovecraftian fractal of thought death. 9999999:1
    - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
      I find it reassuring to read these accounts. Even though I've been in the industry for years, I still have times (like this week), where I spend way too much time trying to do something that I feel shouldn't be that hard to do and imposter syndrome kicks in hard. A lot of what I see on hacker news is people at the top of their game, so it's nice to see people talking about actually struggling.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  What's awful are those bad days when it's actually hours and hours of feeling like an idiot, draining you away, and then when you figure it out you still feel like an idiot because first off it was so simple and second of all solving something in minutes is not going to wash away hours of feeling like an idiot. Luckily as I have gotten older I have gotten fewer and fewer of those days.
  - onemoresoop 6y ago
    I learn to accept when I am tired and need to take a break. Sometimes hours of needling through code can be solved in minutes on a fresh brain. I used to be stubborn and wouldn’t stop until I had made some progress and that went on making a tired day into an exercise in frustration. Took a while to have the confidence to shut down and start fresh the next day.
    - peheje 6y ago
      This hit me real hard, thank you I need to become better at this. Just had a few frustrating days at work, lo and behold problem solved elegantly in 1 hour on a Great Prayer Day where I was supposed to be off-work. The simple solution was just writing out a truth-table and then implementing it using the new C# switch expression to make sure I had all combinations taken into consideration.
  - hermitdev 6y ago
    I once had an issue where it appeared my servers were leaking less than a byte of memory per request (WTF? less than a byte?). It took months to find the bug. Turns out it started leaking once the filesystem quota was reached, the log tried to roll and failed. All logging messages were just building up in a queue. It was a definite face-palm moment once found, but yeah, took months to get there. I had a similar issue w/ a high-res timer that was causing spurious socket timeouts. Only found because...logs were saying operations were taking +200 years to complete. That was about 6 weeks of time during development.
JacksonGariety 6y ago
Love this comment!

SketchySeaBeast 6y ago

When I started my first programming job the CEO told me that programming is 59 minutes of feeling like an idiot and 1 minute of feeling like a genius. It's really stuck with me, and has so far proven true.

sesuximo 6y ago
59:1 is pretty good. Sometimes debugging gets me really down
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  That's when you hack and slash and debug by friction. : p Forging ahead thoughtfully, incrementally, and modularly balances the ratio a lo--oh hey a foreign codebase designed in an overengineered byzantine Lovecraftian fractal of thought death. 9999999:1
  - SketchySeaBeast 6y ago
    I find it reassuring to read these accounts. Even though I've been in the industry for years, I still have times (like this week), where I spend way too much time trying to do something that I feel shouldn't be that hard to do and imposter syndrome kicks in hard. A lot of what I see on hacker news is people at the top of their game, so it's nice to see people talking about actually struggling.
bryanrasmussen 6y ago
What's awful are those bad days when it's actually hours and hours of feeling like an idiot, draining you away, and then when you figure it out you still feel like an idiot because first off it was so simple and second of all solving something in minutes is not going to wash away hours of feeling like an idiot. Luckily as I have gotten older I have gotten fewer and fewer of those days.
- onemoresoop 6y ago
  I learn to accept when I am tired and need to take a break. Sometimes hours of needling through code can be solved in minutes on a fresh brain. I used to be stubborn and wouldn’t stop until I had made some progress and that went on making a tired day into an exercise in frustration. Took a while to have the confidence to shut down and start fresh the next day.
  - peheje 6y ago
    This hit me real hard, thank you I need to become better at this. Just had a few frustrating days at work, lo and behold problem solved elegantly in 1 hour on a Great Prayer Day where I was supposed to be off-work. The simple solution was just writing out a truth-table and then implementing it using the new C# switch expression to make sure I had all combinations taken into consideration.
- hermitdev 6y ago
  I once had an issue where it appeared my servers were leaking less than a byte of memory per request (WTF? less than a byte?). It took months to find the bug. Turns out it started leaking once the filesystem quota was reached, the log tried to roll and failed. All logging messages were just building up in a queue. It was a definite face-palm moment once found, but yeah, took months to get there. I had a similar issue w/ a high-res timer that was causing spurious socket timeouts. Only found because...logs were saying operations were taking +200 years to complete. That was about 6 weeks of time during development.

JacksonGariety 6y ago

Love this comment!