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I'm close to that age, and try to always be growing and improving. I don't look back at 30yo me with disdain. I do find all of normal programmming pretty munda
by RogerL 11y ago
I'm close to that age, and try to always be growing and improving.
I don't look back at 30yo me with disdain. I do find all of normal programmming pretty mundane and cookie cutter. Design this way or that way, pick your trade offs, investigate gotchas, think about what this code will be like in 10 years (most stuff I write has a long life, I don't do web stuff), trade off robust design with get it out the door, and so on. No biggie.
I get my challenges now with new domains - computer vision, computation, math, etc - stuff that requires reading research papers. It's fun. There is always a universe of things you won't know, you just need the humility to understand that, and I think by 30 or so most of us figure that out. If you don't you are pretty bull headed, as the compiler will tell you 1,000 times a day that you don't really know something if you don't. Most people get the clue after awhile ;)
- fragmede 11y ago> (most stuff I write has a long life, Facebook is 11 years old now; Google is 17, and I'd bet there's a line of code somewhere in both of them somewhere there that hasn't been touched in 10 years. > I don't do web stuff) Feel free to pigeonhole yourself like that, but I've learned not to overlook large swaths of industry because it's not 'serious'. Reading research papers? Both Google and Facebook have been writing research papers in many areas, including Computer Vision. As you point out, you need humility to take the time to understand what's come before you, but you also need the hubris to say "we can do better". In the case of FaceNet (Google) or DeepFace (Facebook), much better than state of the art a few years ago.
- greenyoda 11y ago"Feel free to pigeonhole yourself like that, but I've learned not to overlook large swaths of industry because it's not 'serious'." He never said that web programming wasn't serious. He just said he doesn't do work in that area. I'm sure there are lots of areas of computing that the average web programmer "doesn't do" either, like kernel hacking or embedded systems or computer vision. "Reading research papers? Both Google and Facebook have been writing research papers in many areas, including Computer Vision." I'm not sure what your point is. Reading research papers is how you learn what's the state of the art in any field of research (ask any PhD student). If computer vision is a new domain for him, he has to begin by reading, not writing. Even the people who write research papers read many more papers than they write.