10 ms·

How I learned to program

174 points by swyx 5y ago

Lamad123 5y ago
"I was hesitant about taking the job because the interview was the easiest interview I had at any company4, which made me wonder if they had a low hiring bar, and therefore relatively weak engineers." Reeks of paul graam cultism.
whearyou 5y ago
Really enjoyed the childhood part. The whole smart but won’t necessarily “succeed” until you find what you think is cool… really got me with the “yucky” comment on memorizing math
TimSchumann 5y ago
@dang - This should probably have a (2016) in the title.
swyx 5y ago
I always have trouble with reading Dan's blog, so I added some custom CSS here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1449472712720601088 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1449472712720601088 with some explainers
- Zababa 5y ago
  For websites like this I always use the sakura css bookmarklet https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/ https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/. I really appreciate the author lets me and everyone else read their blog the way I like.
  - justshowpost 5y ago
    This is just terrible. This weeaboo stylesheet adds HUGE left and right margins and the spaghettifies the text into column slender as sakura, doh.
    - Zababa 5y ago
      I personally find text with huge margins easier to read than text without, but that's just me.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    This worked great for me on my iPhone. Admittedly it was a pain in the butt to add the bookmarklet to my actual bookmarks, as you can’t long-press to copy it.
- marcos100 5y ago
  I don't know if Chrome has anything similar, but Firefox reader view is awesome for formatting an article and making it easier to read.
  - eyelidlessness 5y ago
    Reader view is great in Safari too, but both are designed to filter content as well and often drop things that shouldn’t be dropped. And Safari’s behavior is intentionally obfuscated, even developing to support it can be a crapshoot.
- harrisonjackson 5y ago
  Quick and dirty option... hop into the chrome dev console and set body width to 80ch and margin-left to somewhere around center of your screen.
- zerocount 5y ago
  I love the minimalist nature of it. No fluff and straight to the content.
chovybizzass 5y ago
i read a lot of books in two weeks. i read a lot of open source code libraries. then i do side projects constantly. i still feel like an imposter.
ncmncm 5y ago
I always learn something anytime I read Dan Luu, even (or particularly) when I have read it before.
baud147258 5y ago
> The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards points for things like "Do you have testers?", which aren't considered best practices by most devs today. Is having dedicated testers really not a best practice? I mean if I compare my experience between projects where we had testers and projects where we didn't, I felt we had better results when we did, if only because it'd free up lot of time from the developpers, who don't have to run a lot of tests and the testers usually think of edge case that we overlook. One downside of having testers is that it kinda slowed down the process of test automation, but in that particular case, it's not the only cause.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  > Is having dedicated testers really not a best practice? It is still a best practice. A lot of companies are doing crazy things that Joel would not agree with -- for example, adopting open office layouts, dropping their QA department, and constantly rewriting code. Joel is not wrong that these are bad ideas, regardless of whether they are widely used or not. Rather, I think it's just more evidence of the growing power of monopolies, that firms can adopt inefficient practices because they are so entrenched.
  - jonas21 5y ago
    Well, that's convenient. Whenever companies do things I disagree with and succeed, it's evidence they must be monopolies!
    - adamisom 5y ago
      Indeed that could be evidence depending on the strength of the beliefs underlying the disagreement. Imagine the parent commenter simply sought out expert consensus and that the consensus was unmistakable; surely you’d agree that if some practice “disagreed”, there’s a higher than average chance something unusual is going on, like monopoly; that’s “evidence”.
      - fastball 5y ago
mattm 5y ago
> People like a good narrative. One narrative people seem to like is that I'm a good problem solver, and that problem solving ability is generalizable. But reality is messy. Electrical engineering seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and I picked it up without trying very hard. Narrative or not, my experience talking with people transitioning from other careers via bootcamps has been that people who came from scientific backgrounds have a very large advantage over those who do not.
- nkingsy 5y ago
  I would say people who are good at languages have an advantage, but that’s a wide definition. Math is the most transferable language and anyone in the sciences has a solid math background. The biggest prerequisite, though, is a love for computers. I’ve been trying to teach my 16 year old nephew to code. He’s an excellent student, great at math, and has made marvelous strides in music (should be very transferable), but his computer literacy is shockingly low. The kid barely knows how to install a program on his laptop. As a result he hasn’t engaged with it like he did when I started showing him stuff on the piano, and has made no progress at all.
  - mkr-hn 5y ago
    A piano with MIDI (USB preferably) and something like Ableton Live might work. Get the full Max and you can code your own devices. https://cycling74.com/products/extendmax https://cycling74.com/products/extendmax Even Max4Live has Node, so it's not exactly limited if you don't want to spend the extra money on Max.
  - Hermitian909 5y ago
    I think love seems like a pre-requisite because of the massive time investment required to become good, but I know really good software engineers who couldn't care less about computers. They just realized they could triple their salary working at companies like Google and so buckled down and learned the skills they needed to get those jobs and then climb the ladder. Most people don't have that kind of discipline and drive, so interest is a good supplement, but I don't think you actually need it.
theonething 5y ago
> In conclusion, life is messy and I don't have any advice. Lol, refreshingly honest.
FpUser 5y ago
>"The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards points for things like "Do you have testers?" and "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?", which aren't considered best practices by most devs today" "Most devs" today are busy producing megatons of JS code with gigatons of external dependencies on things like LTrim(). btw my wife consults for a company that does nothing but software testing for 800lb gorilla companies. The business is striving. I guess they did not know that they should get approval from "most devs" first.
- djmips 5y ago
  I don't understand why 'fixing bugs' before writing new code isn't still a best practice?
  - spc476 5y ago
    Perhaps because of this Bill Gates quote? "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say 'Would you buy a new version because of bugs?' You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis."
aidenn0 5y ago
This is fascinating because apparently the author graduated HS one year after me. There were places that my experience matched almost exactly (e.g. nobody I knew used source control in school) and some that were different. I was a bit jealous to see his first hire was at Centaur. There are very few teams that make microprocessors that aren't full of great people to work with. Actually on that note, can anyone in hardware comment about whether or not hardware people tend to all be awesome, or is it just the hardware people that they let out of their caves to work with embedded software developers?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lordnacho 5y ago
Wow, I had a very similar early years to Dan. I also did the "learning to code as a teen" thing that didn't really work out, other than to establish an interest. I also did EE, which was nice in that for the first time I had an overview the whole way down to the silicon. The big revelation for me though was that you can learn anything yourself. You also don't need to be able to do exam questions to understand something, although you need some maturity to know whether you get it or not. I can almost pinpoint when it happened: I went to a tutorial with a grad student who nonchalantly explained that he was going to read the whole syllabus on biomedical engineering in the next few weeks, by himself. Armed with that, I started my first job in finance. I read a lot of books those first few years, textbooks, biographies, histories, everything. The econ/mgt part of my course didn't really say anything about bonds and derivative pricing, but I found the relevant texts. It helped a lot to have done math heavy courses, but I still ran into new things like stochastic calculus. Concurrently I discovered that a lot of things were getting automated, so I'd better learn how to actually code (my degree actually did go through DS&A, but I had no idea I'd need it). This was more gradual, as the prestige job in finance is trading, not coding. But as time went by it became increasingly clear that if you couldn't code, you narrowed your future opportunities by a lot. These days I'm coding every single day, and most of my issues are coding issues, not trading issues.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

174 points by swyx 5y ago

"I was hesitant about taking the job because the interview was the easiest interview I had at any company4, which made me wonder if they had a low hiring bar, and therefore relatively weak engineers." Reeks of paul graam cultism.

whearyou 5y ago

Really enjoyed the childhood part. The whole smart but won’t necessarily “succeed” until you find what you think is cool… really got me with the “yucky” comment on memorizing math

TimSchumann 5y ago

@dang - This should probably have a (2016) in the title.

swyx 5y ago

I always have trouble with reading Dan's blog, so I added some custom CSS here https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1449472712720601088 https://twitter.com/swyx/status/1449472712720601088 with some explainers

Zababa 5y ago
For websites like this I always use the sakura css bookmarklet https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/ https://oxal.org/projects/sakura/bookmark/. I really appreciate the author lets me and everyone else read their blog the way I like.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  This is just terrible. This weeaboo stylesheet adds HUGE left and right margins and the spaghettifies the text into column slender as sakura, doh.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I personally find text with huge margins easier to read than text without, but that's just me.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  This worked great for me on my iPhone. Admittedly it was a pain in the butt to add the bookmarklet to my actual bookmarks, as you can’t long-press to copy it.
marcos100 5y ago
I don't know if Chrome has anything similar, but Firefox reader view is awesome for formatting an article and making it easier to read.
- eyelidlessness 5y ago
  Reader view is great in Safari too, but both are designed to filter content as well and often drop things that shouldn’t be dropped. And Safari’s behavior is intentionally obfuscated, even developing to support it can be a crapshoot.
harrisonjackson 5y ago
Quick and dirty option... hop into the chrome dev console and set body width to 80ch and margin-left to somewhere around center of your screen.
zerocount 5y ago
I love the minimalist nature of it. No fluff and straight to the content.

chovybizzass 5y ago

i read a lot of books in two weeks. i read a lot of open source code libraries. then i do side projects constantly. i still feel like an imposter.

ncmncm 5y ago

I always learn something anytime I read Dan Luu, even (or particularly) when I have read it before.

baud147258 5y ago

> The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards points for things like "Do you have testers?", which aren't considered best practices by most devs today. Is having dedicated testers really not a best practice? I mean if I compare my experience between projects where we had testers and projects where we didn't, I felt we had better results when we did, if only because it'd free up lot of time from the developpers, who don't have to run a lot of tests and the testers usually think of edge case that we overlook. One downside of having testers is that it kinda slowed down the process of test automation, but in that particular case, it's not the only cause.

rsj_hn 5y ago
> Is having dedicated testers really not a best practice? It is still a best practice. A lot of companies are doing crazy things that Joel would not agree with -- for example, adopting open office layouts, dropping their QA department, and constantly rewriting code. Joel is not wrong that these are bad ideas, regardless of whether they are widely used or not. Rather, I think it's just more evidence of the growing power of monopolies, that firms can adopt inefficient practices because they are so entrenched.
- jonas21 5y ago
  Well, that's convenient. Whenever companies do things I disagree with and succeed, it's evidence they must be monopolies!
  - adamisom 5y ago
    Indeed that could be evidence depending on the strength of the beliefs underlying the disagreement. Imagine the parent commenter simply sought out expert consensus and that the consensus was unmistakable; surely you’d agree that if some practice “disagreed”, there’s a higher than average chance something unusual is going on, like monopoly; that’s “evidence”.
    - fastball 5y ago

mattm 5y ago

> People like a good narrative. One narrative people seem to like is that I'm a good problem solver, and that problem solving ability is generalizable. But reality is messy. Electrical engineering seemed like the most natural thing in the world, and I picked it up without trying very hard. Narrative or not, my experience talking with people transitioning from other careers via bootcamps has been that people who came from scientific backgrounds have a very large advantage over those who do not.

nkingsy 5y ago
I would say people who are good at languages have an advantage, but that’s a wide definition. Math is the most transferable language and anyone in the sciences has a solid math background. The biggest prerequisite, though, is a love for computers. I’ve been trying to teach my 16 year old nephew to code. He’s an excellent student, great at math, and has made marvelous strides in music (should be very transferable), but his computer literacy is shockingly low. The kid barely knows how to install a program on his laptop. As a result he hasn’t engaged with it like he did when I started showing him stuff on the piano, and has made no progress at all.
- mkr-hn 5y ago
  A piano with MIDI (USB preferably) and something like Ableton Live might work. Get the full Max and you can code your own devices. https://cycling74.com/products/extendmax https://cycling74.com/products/extendmax Even Max4Live has Node, so it's not exactly limited if you don't want to spend the extra money on Max.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  I think love seems like a pre-requisite because of the massive time investment required to become good, but I know really good software engineers who couldn't care less about computers. They just realized they could triple their salary working at companies like Google and so buckled down and learned the skills they needed to get those jobs and then climb the ladder. Most people don't have that kind of discipline and drive, so interest is a good supplement, but I don't think you actually need it.

theonething 5y ago

> In conclusion, life is messy and I don't have any advice. Lol, refreshingly honest.

FpUser 5y ago

>"The Joel Test is now considered to be obsolete because it awards points for things like "Do you have testers?" and "Do you fix bugs before writing new code?", which aren't considered best practices by most devs today" "Most devs" today are busy producing megatons of JS code with gigatons of external dependencies on things like LTrim(). btw my wife consults for a company that does nothing but software testing for 800lb gorilla companies. The business is striving. I guess they did not know that they should get approval from "most devs" first.

djmips 5y ago
I don't understand why 'fixing bugs' before writing new code isn't still a best practice?
- spc476 5y ago
  Perhaps because of this Bill Gates quote? "There are no significant bugs in our released software that any significant number of users want fixed. … I'm saying we don't do a new version to fix bugs. We don't. Not enough people would buy it. You can take a hundred people using Microsoft Word. Call them up and say 'Would you buy a new version because of bugs?' You won't get a single person to say they'd buy a new version because of bugs. We'd never be able to sell a release on that basis."

aidenn0 5y ago

This is fascinating because apparently the author graduated HS one year after me. There were places that my experience matched almost exactly (e.g. nobody I knew used source control in school) and some that were different. I was a bit jealous to see his first hire was at Centaur. There are very few teams that make microprocessors that aren't full of great people to work with. Actually on that note, can anyone in hardware comment about whether or not hardware people tend to all be awesome, or is it just the hardware people that they let out of their caves to work with embedded software developers?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

lordnacho 5y ago

Wow, I had a very similar early years to Dan. I also did the "learning to code as a teen" thing that didn't really work out, other than to establish an interest. I also did EE, which was nice in that for the first time I had an overview the whole way down to the silicon. The big revelation for me though was that you can learn anything yourself. You also don't need to be able to do exam questions to understand something, although you need some maturity to know whether you get it or not. I can almost pinpoint when it happened: I went to a tutorial with a grad student who nonchalantly explained that he was going to read the whole syllabus on biomedical engineering in the next few weeks, by himself. Armed with that, I started my first job in finance. I read a lot of books those first few years, textbooks, biographies, histories, everything. The econ/mgt part of my course didn't really say anything about bonds and derivative pricing, but I found the relevant texts. It helped a lot to have done math heavy courses, but I still ran into new things like stochastic calculus. Concurrently I discovered that a lot of things were getting automated, so I'd better learn how to actually code (my degree actually did go through DS&A, but I had no idea I'd need it). This was more gradual, as the prestige job in finance is trading, not coding. But as time went by it became increasingly clear that if you couldn't code, you narrowed your future opportunities by a lot. These days I'm coding every single day, and most of my issues are coding issues, not trading issues.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]