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I follow and sometimes advise on /r/learnpython. There are two types of questions on there that make me shake my head. 1. "How do I do this?" The question oft

I follow and sometimes advise on /r/learnpython. There are two types of questions on there that make me shake my head. 1. "How do I do this?" The question often that can be resolved with a search. This person would rather wait for an answer than do the work of a simple search. 2. "Will this work?" along with some snippet of code. I have to remind myself that they're often kids that have yet to learn how to learn. Still, these are basic skills (searching and experimenting) that should be taught as part of every HS programming class. Then I have the horrifying thought that the people asking these questions are adults that I will either have to work with, or worse, be managed by.

lanstin 5y ago
That is a really interesting point. Experimentation could be taught. There are the various “REPL based dev” rants but experimenting is more general. Although the barriers to entry to each new piece of modern technology seem a little higher. Hello world in Python REPL is a bit easier than a hello world container in a k8s container. I often don’t bother to try out new stuff when I first hear about it because generally the process of getting it to work in the trivial case is 90% of the effort and 90% of the googling Part of the things you learn to increase your power in various environments is how to achieve certain capabilities in certain environments. Now I know how to set up terraform modules to deploy services on VMs with zero downtime deploys, and plop in some lambdas for end to end monitoring with alerts going to the slack channel. I can implement all our new things we need to deploy without too much frame, I just can worry about the picture. It makes me correspondingly less interested in setting the same thing up on Mesos or EKS or whatever. But eventually you get calls to do some new thing three times and you have to respond. Fortunatey, we have people that can deploy helloworld in fifty different frameworks (but don’t seem like they can actually write or debug complicated code). They are useful but it is a weird thing to master. All experiments and no new logic wrested into being to do things.

lanstin 5y ago

That is a really interesting point. Experimentation could be taught. There are the various “REPL based dev” rants but experimenting is more general. Although the barriers to entry to each new piece of modern technology seem a little higher. Hello world in Python REPL is a bit easier than a hello world container in a k8s container. I often don’t bother to try out new stuff when I first hear about it because generally the process of getting it to work in the trivial case is 90% of the effort and 90% of the googling Part of the things you learn to increase your power in various environments is how to achieve certain capabilities in certain environments. Now I know how to set up terraform modules to deploy services on VMs with zero downtime deploys, and plop in some lambdas for end to end monitoring with alerts going to the slack channel. I can implement all our new things we need to deploy without too much frame, I just can worry about the picture. It makes me correspondingly less interested in setting the same thing up on Mesos or EKS or whatever. But eventually you get calls to do some new thing three times and you have to respond. Fortunatey, we have people that can deploy helloworld in fifty different frameworks (but don’t seem like they can actually write or debug complicated code). They are useful but it is a weird thing to master. All experiments and no new logic wrested into being to do things.