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Despite reading essays of other devs telling you how you should dev, have faith in yourself. Over time you'll develop your own proclivities, instincts, etc., an

by sevagh 3y ago

Despite reading essays of other devs telling you how you should dev, have faith in yourself. Over time you'll develop your own proclivities, instincts, etc., and end up writing your own essays to the next generation. People writing essays are not writing it from some impossible point of knowledge or privilege. They're just you in the future.

layer8 3y ago
But also, learn from history. Read books. Luckily, we don’t just have blog-post essays to go on.
ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago
Yes most self taught programmers actually have instinctively a good way of programming if they learn it through hacking. It's a direct and straightforward way of programming not ruined by object oriented thinking or any of the solid principles bullcrap. What does the computer need to do? That is a powerful mindset to get into and building on.
- staunton 3y ago
  This is true for people who have worked on big projects or had to maintain working software over time. However, I dare you to look at the kinds of code that "Jupyter notebook only needs to run once"-scientists write... Many of them have spent a lot of time hacking and can hack together something that runs and works on one input incredibly quickly. In a business, however, that's almost never what you want.
  - sevagh 3y ago
    I still think it's better than this scientist reading a bunch of books about software design patterns and trying to create something they don't really understand. Maybe like a "bad hacked-together first instinct" is easier to correct and build on than "misusing or mangling an advanced dev paradigm that you're not even good to enough to judge whether is appropriate for this usecase."
__turbobrew__ 3y ago
Gusto is the attribute of most successful programmers I know. The gusto to always improve oneself, the gusto to follow through problems where the last 10% is actually 90% of the problem, the gusto to push through ambiguity, the gusto to follow things through on the timespan of years. You don’t need formal training, or “experts” writing blog posts, or the latest fad technology. Gusto and gusto alone can make you successful.

by sevagh 3y ago

layer8 3y ago

But also, learn from history. Read books. Luckily, we don’t just have blog-post essays to go on.

ilrwbwrkhv 3y ago

Yes most self taught programmers actually have instinctively a good way of programming if they learn it through hacking. It's a direct and straightforward way of programming not ruined by object oriented thinking or any of the solid principles bullcrap. What does the computer need to do? That is a powerful mindset to get into and building on.

staunton 3y ago
This is true for people who have worked on big projects or had to maintain working software over time. However, I dare you to look at the kinds of code that "Jupyter notebook only needs to run once"-scientists write... Many of them have spent a lot of time hacking and can hack together something that runs and works on one input incredibly quickly. In a business, however, that's almost never what you want.
- sevagh 3y ago
  I still think it's better than this scientist reading a bunch of books about software design patterns and trying to create something they don't really understand. Maybe like a "bad hacked-together first instinct" is easier to correct and build on than "misusing or mangling an advanced dev paradigm that you're not even good to enough to judge whether is appropriate for this usecase."

__turbobrew__ 3y ago

Gusto is the attribute of most successful programmers I know. The gusto to always improve oneself, the gusto to follow through problems where the last 10% is actually 90% of the problem, the gusto to push through ambiguity, the gusto to follow things through on the timespan of years. You don’t need formal training, or “experts” writing blog posts, or the latest fad technology. Gusto and gusto alone can make you successful.