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Would you still consider yourself an "amateur-hour web designer"? If not, why did you improve? Should we not aspire to be better?
by nightski 12y ago
Would you still consider yourself an "amateur-hour web designer"? If not, why did you improve? Should we not aspire to be better?
- lmm 12y agoI've learnt from various sources, but none of them were papers. There is no one-size-fits-all teaching or learning method. And rudeness and insults are going to make people less likely to learn, not more.
- grobinson 12y agoIs that not because, at the time, you were much more of a beginner than you are now? I've been studying Computer Science for the last four years (BSc and now MSc) but was coding for maybe three years before that. Back then I was learning JavaScript and PHP from w3schools, PHP.net and some blogs. I built a framework from reading the source code for CodeIgniter. I learn't a lot about object orientated design, or the lack thereof, in that project. By the time I finished 2nd year of Comp Sci I had a pretty good understanding of algorithms, design patterns, some theory (Petri-nets, state machines, etc..), databases, etc. Going into my MSc, there is quite a lot that you can't learn without reading papers. For example, chances are you are going to have no idea how to solve the consensus problem in a distributed system without reading Paxos.
- lmm 12y agoI tried to read the Paxos paper and gave up. The Raft paper I probably could've understood, but I found it easier to understand by looking at an implementation and a less formal description of it. I don't think it's about what you know (plenty of papers have few prerequisites and are conceptually quite simple).
- kuni-toko-tachi 12y agoI've been writing software for 20/years, and had I learned the concepts brought forth in these papers years ago, I would have been much better. Hacking is not writing software.