3 ms·

Agreed with much of this! However I disagree with "that's the nature of software engineering. You never stop learning and evolving." The reason: burnout. My g

by newyear2012 15y ago

Agreed with much of this! However I disagree with "that's the nature of software engineering. You never stop learning and evolving." The reason: burnout. My guess is that at least 10% of developers begin to lose enthusiasm for coding after a few years and then at some point either change jobs, become managers, or just have very little motivation to learn having seen the futility of it all. They may be forced to continue to learn, but may do so at a slow pace. Why? You write code and after years or less, it can be thrown away or unused without much of a thought. You see that many of those driving projects really don't have some sort of higher purpose, and other than some perceived business need, must of it is just "wouldn't it be nice". I feel that it is sick for a person to continue blindly learning new technology just for the sake of it. You need to have a reason. Jobs was not my favorite person in the world, but one thing he did right was to believe in what he was doing and why he was doing it. Without this, any evolution is worthless.

devs1010 15y ago
I agree with this for the most part, this is one reason I have fallen in love a bit recently with RAD frameworks, personally I have been using Spring Roo, which is somewhat similar to Ruby on Rails, but for Java, from what I understand. Basically, when working on a project, I want to take the shortest route to accomplishing the end need, maybe it won't be immediately scalable to thousands of users or fully optimized but as long as you don't paint yourself into a corner that can come later. I have noticed a lot of other developers are so caught up in the minutia that they can't see the forest for the trees, they care more about endless iterations, writing test cases, etc than just delivering something that works.
- chipsy 15y ago
  Agreement; the more I code the more I want to find "quick iteration" solutions and minimize deliberate engineering of complexity. I know a few coders who have spun their wheels for a decade or possibly longer because they're still idealizing wheel reinvention. The reinvention is the easy part - after all, someone already did it, so you're just learning what they did, "the hard way." What's hard is learning to leverage the ecosystem as much as possible while bringing in original ideas; as in entrepreneurship, there are no tutorials for that.
  - devs1010 15y ago
    yep, I just found myself saying something like this the other day when talking with another engineer about the issues at the current company I work for. Its my belief that modern web application development is primarily about leveraging existing frameworks and libraries to deliver the results, failure to take advantage of an existing resource can cause the project to be much more complex to maintain and waste tons of efforts programming aspects of the project that aren't concentrating on the actual domain problem that is trying to be solved.

devs1010 15y ago

I agree with this for the most part, this is one reason I have fallen in love a bit recently with RAD frameworks, personally I have been using Spring Roo, which is somewhat similar to Ruby on Rails, but for Java, from what I understand. Basically, when working on a project, I want to take the shortest route to accomplishing the end need, maybe it won't be immediately scalable to thousands of users or fully optimized but as long as you don't paint yourself into a corner that can come later. I have noticed a lot of other developers are so caught up in the minutia that they can't see the forest for the trees, they care more about endless iterations, writing test cases, etc than just delivering something that works.

chipsy 15y ago
Agreement; the more I code the more I want to find "quick iteration" solutions and minimize deliberate engineering of complexity. I know a few coders who have spun their wheels for a decade or possibly longer because they're still idealizing wheel reinvention. The reinvention is the easy part - after all, someone already did it, so you're just learning what they did, "the hard way." What's hard is learning to leverage the ecosystem as much as possible while bringing in original ideas; as in entrepreneurship, there are no tutorials for that.
- devs1010 15y ago
  yep, I just found myself saying something like this the other day when talking with another engineer about the issues at the current company I work for. Its my belief that modern web application development is primarily about leveraging existing frameworks and libraries to deliver the results, failure to take advantage of an existing resource can cause the project to be much more complex to maintain and waste tons of efforts programming aspects of the project that aren't concentrating on the actual domain problem that is trying to be solved.