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Reading the bullets for a minute I thought I was Bob, but I've never done Android for real, so no, but the rest mostly fits. I'm maybe not quite that productiv

Reading the bullets for a minute I thought I was Bob, but I've never done Android for real, so no, but the rest mostly fits. I'm maybe not quite that productive, either, but close. I have the advantage of being old and curious, and working with the same codebase for the last 10 years. What helps me is a really good manager - of which I have had two out of ??? in 25 years. When I'm out of tasks they allowed me to refactor and fix longstanding difficult bugs. It has the added advantage of getting me deeper into the code and allowing me to build better foundations for future work which makes me more productive for a nice feedback loop. They also have allowed me to train up other developers and write up official coding standards with down time and that has been great, too. It's nice when all your code looks mostly the same. Also being able to repeatedly decline a promotion to management but still get paid well has been good for company loyalty. There is a downside in that most days feel like, well, kind of like a Games Workshop orc going "Waaaaaaaah!" where I'm just hurtling through the work and my brain is just spinning max RPM and then I go home and it's hard to stop the momentum. I have to excercise to clear my head or I won't sleep.

comfypotato 4y ago
This is the lifestyle to which I aspire. Can you provide your “most helpful tip” that got you to this place?
- redleggedfrog 4y ago
  comfypotato, sorry for the delay in replying, I only read Hacker News morning and evening. Hmm, a single "most helpful tip" - that's tricky. Okay, how about, "read a lot of code and write a lot of code". Thing is, I really like programming, and would do it even if I wasn't paid. Early on, way back in the DOS days, I wrote most of the programs I used - contact manager, calendar, compy automation and so on, in C, then C++. Then when Windows came along I wrote the same things in Borland Delphi. When I want to learn something, I spent a fair amount of time studying up front, but I learn way faster just starting to write something. Walking through with a debugger tells you a lot more than docs. Professionally it has been much the same. I work on a lot of legacy systems. I learn the code, usually by debugging, and then when asked to do something, I usually refactor to be more modern and reusable, and then do that reuse when possible. I'm not really a neophile so if I have a bunch of services I've used for 5 years that work great I'll just keep using them. Everything gets done with an eye for re-usability. I love solid code I can depend on. Also, I keep really, really, stringent coding standards for myself, and the Dev team is mostly the same. We've agreed to these as a group, so we code review everything for SOLID, KISS, and conformity to our code review guidelines. It makes reading code a lot easier. I hope that helps.
  - comfypotato 4y ago
    Thank you very much for this thoughtful reply. I can very much relate to enjoying programming; it's a hobby. It would be nice if everyone could make a living off of their hobby like I do (guitar playing, for example), but I'll be content with my lot on this. Seems like I could break your "tip" down into "write a lot of code" with an honorable mention to "coding standards help".

comfypotato 4y ago

This is the lifestyle to which I aspire. Can you provide your “most helpful tip” that got you to this place?

redleggedfrog 4y ago
comfypotato, sorry for the delay in replying, I only read Hacker News morning and evening. Hmm, a single "most helpful tip" - that's tricky. Okay, how about, "read a lot of code and write a lot of code". Thing is, I really like programming, and would do it even if I wasn't paid. Early on, way back in the DOS days, I wrote most of the programs I used - contact manager, calendar, compy automation and so on, in C, then C++. Then when Windows came along I wrote the same things in Borland Delphi. When I want to learn something, I spent a fair amount of time studying up front, but I learn way faster just starting to write something. Walking through with a debugger tells you a lot more than docs. Professionally it has been much the same. I work on a lot of legacy systems. I learn the code, usually by debugging, and then when asked to do something, I usually refactor to be more modern and reusable, and then do that reuse when possible. I'm not really a neophile so if I have a bunch of services I've used for 5 years that work great I'll just keep using them. Everything gets done with an eye for re-usability. I love solid code I can depend on. Also, I keep really, really, stringent coding standards for myself, and the Dev team is mostly the same. We've agreed to these as a group, so we code review everything for SOLID, KISS, and conformity to our code review guidelines. It makes reading code a lot easier. I hope that helps.
- comfypotato 4y ago
  Thank you very much for this thoughtful reply. I can very much relate to enjoying programming; it's a hobby. It would be nice if everyone could make a living off of their hobby like I do (guitar playing, for example), but I'll be content with my lot on this. Seems like I could break your "tip" down into "write a lot of code" with an honorable mention to "coding standards help".