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A bunch of programming advice I'd give to myself 15 years ago

BiteCode_dev
71 replies
6h13m

Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming.

You can only understand them because you lived those situations, which implies experience you don't have.

I would say (specifically to my young self):

- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

- Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be mad at you, and they are right. But do it anyway. Yes, reboot the servers with users on it. Yes, commit the spaghetti. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.

- The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

- Doing something for the hell of it is worth it. Just make it separate from the point above so they don't conflict.

- Programming is a battle against complexity. Again and again. Put that on a post-it. Make your decisions based on it. You will suck at it, but try.

- You have imposter syndrome because you are an imposter. You are really bad. It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them. Don't sweat it. It will come.

- You need faith it will work out. On the long run, you'll get better at this. But in the short term also. You'll find the bug. You'll figure out the solution. It will happen if you keep at it even if it can be frustratingly long and unfair. Even if it doesn't feel like that right now.

- The right team is way more important than the right tech. If you are alone, get in touch with people who will lift you up from time to time.

jameshart
14 replies
5h16m

You have imposter syndrome because you are an imposter. You are really bad. It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them

What in the medical malpractice?

ponector
11 replies
5h8m

A recent Johns Hopkins study claims more than 250,000 people in the U.S. die every year from medical errors.

It is ok to be an imposter.

jameshart
6 replies
5h2m

Is it your impression that the medical profession thinks that’s ok?

4RealFreedom
2 replies
4h47m

Yes. Nothing is perfect. The remedy they've chosen is to rely on insurance. There is a reason we call doctor's offices 'practices'.

thfuran
0 replies
4h22m

There is, but it's not what you're implying.

switch007
0 replies
4h16m

You think they're called practices because of the less common usage of the term to mean an amateur learning something, to imply they're inexperienced/without training?

Rather than it being the place where a practitioner works? ("someone whose regular work has involved a lot of training")

whamlastxmas
0 replies
4h54m

The medical industrial complex clearly thinks it is, otherwise there would drastically lower patient loads, allow more spots for medical school, and provide better working conditions that would allow for fewer mistakes. None of this is happening and is an implicit acceptance of medical error deaths

patrick451
0 replies
4h46m

They obviously do. Just look at the way they run residency programs. They work those poor kids to the bone under minimal supervision. Only the most disingenuous can pretend it's an accident when something goes wrong. The system is clearly designed to harm people.

BiteCode_dev
0 replies
4h34m

Show me a hospital, and I'll show you overworked, under slept young doctors that have to deal with paper work, and are swimming in a field with heavy lobbying.

But even without this, the thing is, when you don't know, you will make mistakes.

And when your job is to take care of people, mistakes hurt them.

It's the nature of things.

Last year I had 3 medical errors, one that almost got me killed, by very well-meaning professionals.

Closing your eyes and pretending it doesn't happen is naive at best.

But people have to start somewhere. They can't stay in theory forever. And no amount of preparation will save you from making terrible mistakes.

Since we can't put an experienced doctor behind every intern 24/7, there is no real solution to this for now.

Same for programming.

goosejuice
3 replies
4h26m

Yeah let's go build some shoddy bridges and crash some planes while we're at it.

Individuals can be new to a practice and feel like imposters but we shouldn't be pointing to statistics like this as an example of why it's ok.

I can't believe people think like this.

BiteCode_dev
2 replies
4h14m

Planes and bridges are problems where the quality control can be centralized and you can therefore put a lot of redundancy.

Even then, the Boeing scandal shows it's not bulletproof.

It's not the same for medicine. There are way more doctors than you can put safety nets. Also, when a plane crashes, it's on the news, it costs money and PR. Much less so with doctors.

The plane industry is not inherently more moral, just more liable. Responsibility in the health industry is way more diluted.

It's not that we WANT to pay the price of people learning. I wish I would not have had the wrong meds given to me last year.

It's just that the system is not currently set up to do it otherwise.

So you can feel guilty and stop moving, and you will not learn. You will not grow. And you will actually hurt people for a longer period because you will still make mistakes.

Or you can own it and accept the inevitable: doing things means having actual consequences on the world.

If you want, you can dedicate your life to change the whole system and make it better. But I don't think anybody in this thread is doing that right now.

I did see a lot of people on their high horses, but doing nothing though, paralyzed because they were looking for a way to never break anything.

Me, for example. For years.

goosejuice
1 replies
3h55m

Sure, we're human. There is no argument there.

However, normalizing the loss of human life as part of the learning algorithm is psychopathic. There's a time and a place to make mistakes... In mission critical situations that's in training and everywhere else we should aspire for safeguards that prevent the loss of life due to mistakes.

In medicine a lot of these deaths can be prevented through greater care. It's not different than engineering in that respect. The greater problem is decision makers putting profits over life. And this kind of mentality in this thread is just fuel for that kind of behavior. It's gross.

babel_
0 replies
2h44m

I think you're misreading a singular opinion as occurring between two disparate points here.

The initial phrase was > doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them

It's then a separate reply from someone else about deaths from errors/malpractice.

So, nobody seems to be expressing the mentality you are, correctly, lambasting (at least so far as I've read in the comments). But, as it is relevant to the lessons we'd all want to pass back to ourselves (in my opinion, it's because we wish to hold ourselves accountable to said lessons for the future), let's address the elephant in the comment.

Normalising deaths, especially the preventable ones, is absolutely not something that anybody here is suggesting (so far as my read of the situation is).

Normalising responsibility, by recognising that we can cause harm and so do something about it, that seems far more in-line with the above comments.

As you say it yourself, there's a time and a place, which is undoubtedly what we hope to foster for those who are younger or at the start of learning any discipline, beyond programming, medicine, or engineering.

Nobody is saying that the death and loss is acceptable and normalised, but rather that in the real world we need a certain presence around the knowledge that they will occur, to a certain degree, regardless. So, we accept responsibility for what we can prevent, and strive to push the frontier of our capacity further with this in mind. For some, that comes from experience, unfortunately. For others, they can start to grapple with the notion in lieu of it through considering the consequences, and the scale of consequence; as the above comments would be evidence of, at least by implication.

These are not the only ways to develop a mindset of responsibility, fortunately, but that is what they can be, even if you find the literal wording to suggest otherwise. I cannot, of course, attest to the "true" feelings of others, but neither can anyone else... But in the spirit of the matter, consider: Your sense of responsibility, in turn, seems receptive to finding the areas by which such thinking can become justification for the very thing it would otherwise prevent, either as a shield purpose-built for the role or co-opted out of convenience. That too becomes integral, as we will always need to avoid complacency, and so must also promote this vigilance to become a healthy part of the whole for a responsible mindset -- lest we become that which we seek to prevent, and all that.

Exactly as you say, there's a greater problem, but this thinking is not necessarily justification for it, and can indeed become another tool to counter it. More responsibility, more mindfulness about our intents, actions, and consequences? That will prove indispensable for us to actually solve the greater problem, so we must appreciate that different paths will be needed to achieve it, after all, there are many different justifications for that problem which will all need to be robustly refuted and shown for what they are. Doing so won't solve the problem, but is rather one of many steps we will need to take.

Regardless, this mindfulness and vigilance about ourselves, as much as about each other, will be self-promoting through the mutual reinforcement of these qualities. If someone must attempt to visualise the staggering scale of consequence as part of developing this, then so be it. In turn, they will eventually grapple with this vigilance as well, as the responsibility behoves them to, else they may end up taking actions and having consequences that are equivalent to the exact mentality you fear, even if they do/did not actually "intend" to do so. The learning never ends, and the mistakes never will, so we must have awareness of the totality of this truth; even if only as best we can manage within our limited abilities.

cqqxo4zV46cp
1 replies
4h47m

Making a mistake or a reasonable but ultimately incorrect call is not malpractice. Doctors are just people, just like the rest of us, and certainly you. It’s scary if you think that the medical system is more of a safety net than it actually is, but your gripe is with the precarious nature of life, not medicine.

jameshart
0 replies
3h54m

Figuring out how to be a doctor by faking it til you make it most definitely is malpractice though, and ‘don’t worry, you’re an imposter but you only learn by screwing up’ is very much not how doctors learn their job.

The Hippocratic oath is not ‘first, do some harm, as long as you’re learning’.

penteract
9 replies
5h25m

There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

This may be good advice for yourself in the past, and for many people at lots of times, but I'd hesitate to give it as general advice. Reading code others have written should not be understated as way to learn valuable things from fundamental patterns and algorithms to language features and idioms. If you have a job in a team, this may happen anyway, but it's possible to write lots of code without realizing there's a better way.

supriyo-biswas
2 replies
4h35m

Although, I should point out that reading code is not the same as reading tutorials. Reading code occurs with a kind of intent and focus that is missing when you don’t know much, and thus you may end up falling into the trap of studying multiple tutorials without really trying out much yourself.

penteract
1 replies
4h21m

Tutorials include some code which is intended to be exemplary and simple enough for a new programmer to make sense of, so I wouldn't discount it as a part of reading code. Practical code does not always have those properties, although you'd certainly be missing a lot if you only read code from tutorials.

I completely agree with the claim "There is no substitute for doing", and I might even say that code you read without running and tweaking it doesn't count.

cess11
0 replies
2h38m

Trying to learn to become a developer from tutorials is like trying to become a carpenter by reading instruction manuals for saws, nail guns, &c.

To learn how to implement computer programs, read books about it.

ffsm8
1 replies
4h36m

But you're not going to realize which way it's better unless you've written the bad code before.

BiteCode_dev
0 replies
4h21m

Tangential, but I think that's the problem with trying to learn from design patterns.

I read about them and tried to apply them.

That's backward and didn't produce anything good.

I started to understand them by doing it the other way around:

- Coding, solving problems.

- Reading other people's sources.

- Then reinventing half a terrible design pattern.

- Later on, looking at a book: "ohhh, that's what I tried to do" or "ohhh, hence the snippet in that source".

- Now I can discuss with people about the pattern and name my code entities according to that.

Design patterns are a communication tool.

BiteCode_dev
1 replies
4h37m

Indeed it's not general advice, it's to me specifically, who used to procrastinate a lot under the guise of learning.

northrup
0 replies
4h33m

Same. I would fall into the same trap. One more article, another tutorial, another chapter of a book… juuust to make sure I understood the concepts; and what actually helped? Just coding, getting it wrong, fixing it, getting it wrong, fixing it, etc.

PartiallyTyped
0 replies
4h30m

I think reading code to understand because you forked a project and want to continue it is very different to following tutorials.

CM30
0 replies
1h35m

I'd definitely agree that reading others' code can be a good way of learning, especially if you take the time to disassemble it line by line and look up things like what language features and functions they're using, how it's structured, etc.

graypegg
8 replies
6h5m

A bit snarky, but I would add

- don’t read opinions from a list and take it as gospel. Adapt to the jobs you’re in, and you’ll develop your own opinions, but now with experience to explain why. Opinions are formed by getting repeatedly hit with the consequences of your (and other’s) decisions, and everyone just has to take enough hits till the pattern seeking area of your brain takes over.

FLT8
4 replies
5h22m

Maybe add to that: try to stay long enough in a role to really feel the consequences of your actions. Even better if you're on pager for a while too. I know it's not trendy to stay in a job for long these days, and conventional wisdom is it's not great for your salary either, but one thing it will do is allow you to understand whether decisions you made were actually good or not.

There are roles I've been in where it's only been years later that the true impact of decisions made was actually apparent. I'm glad I hung around long enough to experience that.

BiteCode_dev
1 replies
4h31m

Skin in the game is important.

I have a terrible programmer friend.

He is better at creating actual products than most people I met because his livelihood is on the line: he makes money only from websites.

So he is not living in the abstract idea of best practices, he had to make it profitable for the last two decades, with little resources to go by on top of that.

And he does.

After 10 years, he is still asking me how to write git commands. And I'm still learning from him to shed a lot of BS from my practices.

intelVISA
0 replies
3h6m

Being directly chained to the financial outcome of your works will have you dropping Scrum for Scheme real quick...

scott_w
0 replies
4h36m

I wholeheartedly agree with this advice and have for over a decade now. I think there’s something in the fact that you know you caused that that helps the lesson stick. Potentially you will understand the assumptions you had then vs now that allows you to clearly see the underlying lesson to take.

mgkimsal
0 replies
4h4m

I've been called back to code long after I left an org, and have had to review my own code 10-12-15 years after the fact. Seeing both the positive and negative aspects of decisions having played out in the real world was something it's hard to get from reading, and I'd argue somewhat harder to get even if you stay inside the same org for that length of time. Staying on the inside, you'll rationalize a lot of the changes to the code, the team and org over time, and it may be harder to be more objective about the impact the code has had.

I was quite proud of some decisions, but realized the negative long term impact of others. Trying to share that experience and whatever 'wisdom' or 'lessons learned' with others has been its own challenge in some situations, because you can easily come across as "the old person" who doesn't "get it" wrt to current trends. Some issues are evergreen and fundamental, but it's difficult for less experienced people to understand why some of these things are really core. I'm not sure there's much substitute for experience in many cases.

BiteCode_dev
1 replies
5h57m

I agree, and would say is equivalent to:

- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.
graypegg
0 replies
5h51m

Yes true. Mostly just opining on the “list of everything you gotta’ know” is a bit TOO concrete IMO. (As opposed to too abstract)

I was quoting out of similar things years ago at the start of my career, “it should be done this way because X said it” didn’t help me at all.

It feels like insulation against being called too junior, since, you can just wholesale adopt someone else’s list of ideas and you’re good. But making mistakes because you’re new to the career is precisely what forms the base of those opinions in the first place.

efortis
0 replies
5h33m

I agree, form your opinions when you have enough information.

For example, if you can’t decide between two data structures or tech, pick one and add a comment:

// I’m not sure

dano
6 replies
6h4m

* This * - The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

bdw5204
4 replies
5h26m

To the extent users do care about the tech, they care about performance not how "clean" the code is or whether you're using the newest framework. Users hate when software is slow or uses an exorbitant amount of memory.

bazoom42
1 replies
5h9m

Most users have no idea how much memory a piece of software uses. They care about user experience though which means they will care if the UI hangs or is unresponsive.

graypegg
0 replies
4h38m

Bingo. I’d go further and say they don’t care about your application at all. They just want to do something, and your application’s quality is measured by how little it stands in the way of accomplishing that.

The sad fact is this encapsulates features (ease of development, a framework probably does help you ship faster), adaptability (clean abstractions that are easy to work with), and performance.

Finding that balance is always going to be hard but they’re all important!

imhoguy
0 replies
1h23m

And if the product is aimed at prousers/communities who extend the functionality themselves with their own commands, scripts and plugins.

dano
0 replies
5h2m

Yeah, I totally agree. Those other factors are internal optimizations. What gets me is when a team wants to switch horses to new tech and do a forklift upgrade just to implement something using the new hotness.

CM30
0 replies
1h23m

This 100%. It's especially noticeable in the world of game development, where you see games that are ridiculously buggy and poorly made (on a coding basis) selling millions of copies and changing the industry. The original generation 1 Pokemon games are probably some of the best examples of this, though I'm pretty sure anyone who's reversed engineered any game from the Atari era onwards has probably been left wondering "what the hell were they thinking?"

But it doesn't matter. They were designed well, they were fun to play, and millions of people enjoyed them.

ourmandave
4 replies
5h22m

Stop being obsessed with quality: you are not at the level where you can provide it yet. Do dirty. Do badly. But ship.

You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.

What if future you has reached that level and people on your team are shipping spaghetti?

rileymat2
2 replies
5h16m

I feel like this is bad advice, really, you need to be obsessed with quality and growth, but you can't let that stop you from shipping. Try for clean to the best of your ability in the time constraints you have, but accept that it will be dirty.

graypegg
0 replies
4h56m

I think aiming for clean is good, but it’s really hard to pin down what clean means when you’re starting out.

I feel like just emulating what you see in your first few jobs is ideal. (As in, ask coworkers who know the thing you’re working on) It could be great code to be inspired from, or mediocre. Either way you get some input about what decisions result in what outcomes, and what the outcome “feels” like.

And if it comes time to change one or many of those decisions later on in this codebase, the person doing it gets a uniform codebase to work from! Unique abstractions and fixes in random places makes refactoring harder.

BiteCode_dev
0 replies
4h8m

Obsession will stop you from shipping.

Or it's not an obsession.

It's caring.

Very few people can pull off a Steve Job level of nitpicking and actually finish a project.

I certainly couldn't, and that advice is for young me.

intelVISA
0 replies
3h6m

Then you find a new team, else you can do the classic 'making one trivial hill your Happy Path and be prepared to die on it' routine.

cm2187
4 replies
5h4m

A way to rephrase your point about complexity is this wonderful quote "Developers are drawn to complexity like moths to a flame, often with the same outcome" (Neal Ford)

spoiler
3 replies
4h9m

I've experienced this too, but I never understood why this phenomenon happens.

Is it because we start adding abstractions before we understand the problems?

Like, there's a certain threshold where keep things too simple makes them too complex, so people start introducing abstractions to reduce complexity. But often it's the wrong abstractions and then we accidentally end up with worse complexity that's harder to unravel.

There must be a term for this waves hand thing?

Edit: gosh typical on phones is hard

devctx
1 replies
3h49m

The commonly used term, also mentioned by Fred Brooks, is accidental complexity. Accidental highlights the non intentional nature of devs introducing complexity.

spoiler
0 replies
3h30m

Isn't accidental complexity just complexity that's not part of the problem domain? Say in the context of serving content/downloads, accidentally complexity would be caching, proxies, CDNs (etc). Basically stuff that we have to deal with to handle or optimise downloads, but isn't inherently part of the "just downloading files" problem?

layer8
0 replies
2h53m

It’s because when you’re in the middle of things with a lot of context in your head, adding another little wrinkle feels like a negligible complication (in particular if the new wrinkle is ostensibly to reduce some complexity, or to ship more quickly), but those complications accumulate up to the limits of any developer’s comprehension (and beyond) rather sooner than later. Hence developers tend to work close to the limit of what they can handle in terms of complexity, which for anyone who hasn’t all the same context in their head (like the developers themselves some time later) is really more than they can handle in an effective manner.

From another perspective, this is a form of entropy: There are many more ways to increase complexity than to reduce it. This is also the reason why biological life has been getting more complex over time, the only criterion being if it’s fit to survive and reproduce.

marcusbuffett
3 replies
5h59m

These seem just as abstract as mine, if not more so, plus at least I provided examples where I could. Feels weird to criticize my post for general advice + examples, then come up with your own general advice without examples.

Also this was just an analogy I know, but doctors definitely don’t hurt people for years while trying to save them, very different profession from ours, if anything doctors earlier in their career have been shown to have better results.

imhoguy
0 replies
1h36m

I think you both provide some kind of generational advice, like parent serving kid with life advice. Unfortunatelly, or fortunatelly, they will have to learn it by experiencing own failures first.

aniviacat
0 replies
3h23m

I think you are trying to address different audiences. While your tips are mostly targeted at people who are already working as programmers, the parent comment's tips are mostly targeted at complete beginners.

E.g. this tip:

- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

is directly addressing a common mistake for absolute beginners. Many beginners will read (or worse yet, watch) loads of coding tutorials while doing little themsves. It is an issue a complete beginner encounters and understands.

Your tip on the other hand:

If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun

is addressing people working on medium to large projects with internal tooling. That is not a situation a complete beginner finds themselves in; it's a situation someone who already works in programming for a while finds themselves in.

I wouldn't necessarily say your tips are too abstract; they are simply too high level for a complete beginner.

That is not necessarily a bad thing; perhaps the you of 15 years ago already had the basic understanding necessary to be able to comprehend and make use of your tips.

aiisjustanif
0 replies
1h54m

I really liked “You should know all the major shortcuts in your editor. You should be a confident and fast typist. You should know your OS well. You should be proficient in the shell. You should know how to use the browser dev tools effectively.”

Typing skills are severely underrated in order to professions and roles adject to our professions like PM.

johnisgood
3 replies
5h55m

I have a very severe case of impostor syndrome. :(

lioeters
0 replies
5h36m

In a world of imposters, the half decent imposter is king.

bregma
0 replies
5h22m

Don't worry, you're not a real imposter. You've just inadvertently ended up in a position where you're expected to be one. Just fake it until you actually become a true imposter.

BiteCode_dev
0 replies
4h1m

You probably are. But most of your colleagues as well :)

Most adults are kids in big meat suits, they fake it a lot.

I started to live like I was not completely worthless at 35.

Not saying that to be proud of it, just stating that if you think humanity should do better, the first person you'll judge is you.

It will be glaringly obvious you are not meeting your own standards.

The higher your standard, the longer it will take for you to reach them.

And the way to get there faster is to ignore the shame, and do it anyway. Because if you don't, your growth will be slower, and you will do more damage for longer.

Real life means real consequences.

It will make you more tolerant of others as well. Way more tolerant.

ryandrake
2 replies
3h33m

- The users don't care about the tech. They care about the result.

Seasoned, grownup engineers and tech business leaders are forgetting this, even today. Users don't care that your product is made with AI, but techies just will not shut up about Generative AI, LLMs, Transformers and all this shit that should be implementation details. Users don't care about any of what goes into the sausage.

bazoom42
1 replies
3h28m

Investors care though, and for many startups the customer they need to appeal to is investors.

ryandrake
0 replies
3h16m

I don't understand why investors care, either. Product A is made with traditional algorithms, product B is made with AI and LLMs, product C is made with literal magic and wizardry. But they all do exactly the same thing. Why does an investor prefer to invest in product B?

jerf
1 replies
3h34m

"Those are way too abstract advice when you start programming."

I have come to the conclusion that the use of these sorts of posts is not that the reader, young or otherwise, will instantly and correctly apply all the lessons to their lives.

It's more about sensitizing people to problems they may not currently see, and solutions they may not currently be aware of. It's about shortening the learning curve, rather than eliminating it.

A 1-year programmer is not going to read themselves into a 20-year programmer, no matter what they read. But at the 5 year level I think you'll see a lot of difference between someone who never considers their craft and never pushes themselves, just keeps their heads down and doing the next bug, and the person who has even just occasionally read this sort of post, pondered how it may apply to their current situation, and taken out of it what they can... which may be something completely different than what they take out if they read the exact same post two years later.

password4321
0 replies
2h32m

Yes, countering "you don't know what you don't know"

Zenzero
1 replies
4h30m

It's ok, doctors hurt people for years while learning to save them.

Modern medical education doesn't work this way.

BiteCode_dev
0 replies
4h4m

Yeah, I'm surrounded with medical professionals.

It totally does.

They make grave mistakes all the time. And they hide them. They lie about them.

They have their ego and career on the line.

And they don't have enough resources at their disposal, not enough hours, too many patients, and they are exhausted.

In short, they are humans in a human system.

thfuran
0 replies
5h15m

Do dirty. Do badly. But ship. Some people will be mad at you, and they are right. But do it anyway. Yes, reboot the servers with users on it. Yes commit the spaghetti. You'll reach the level you want to avoid doing all this.

I think you're likely to reach that level a lot faster by trying and failing than by not trying at all.

neilv
0 replies
3h58m

Doing something for the hell of it is worth it. Just make it separate from the point above so they don't conflict.

This is a great use for new, standalone open source modules: feel free to experiment with styles or techniques or goals that you wouldn't want to justify. (Or for experiments that you start and then abandon without ever showing anyone.)

For example, when I was making lots of packages to help build out the Racket ecosystem, I'd already made an HTML-writing package, but I felt a craving to do one that used syntax extension at compile time, rather than dynamic s-expressions. So I just did it, as a separate package: https://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/html-template/

I don't recall anyone saying they saw value in it, but I like it, and I scratched that itch, and added another skill to my programming mental bag of tricks.

karmakaze
0 replies
3h35m

Most of these lists do not advise on "programming" the task but rather "programming" the job/position. There's no problem with that, I'd just wish it was labelled "software engineering advice" or "advice for programmers". Few of the points are about programming itself and the list is overall pretty good.

Consider this just a rant from an older programmer who hasn't fully recognized that 'programming' is now largely a social endeavor with online info for everything, language and library ecosystems, etc. I wonder how much of this information I would have internalized if it were all available in my time. Seems like the kind of thing I might read and nod in agreement and forget to apply when relevant without some hard earned run-ins (which is how I'd picked them up).

As for actual programming advice, the thing I'd highlight is to look at the data first and foremost. It goes from initial conditions to post conditions. The differences are what your program/function does, but both the pre/post conditions should be able to be fully described as a valid static state. Once you understand that, the problem, the code is largely plumbing with a small part that applies the functional transformation. There's so much focus on the form and style of "the code" that seems to consider it the main thing rather than an artifact of getting the main thing done: think any time there seems to be fancy abstractions that don't provide value to offset its complexity. To relate it to a point in the post, if you can't connect the difficulty you're having with the logical transformation that needs to be done (e.g. from database state to state), it's likely self-inflicted (or it could be due to a poor choice of database schema). Similarly for poor choices of request/response formats--basically bad plumbing between systems (and not intrinsically hard because of the information being handled).

TheRoque
0 replies
4h10m

I never really got the "it's ok to be an imposter", "it's ok to be bad" part... And the internet is full of people saying things like "I am a developer and I have no idea what I'm doing haha".

Seriously, you might be inexperienced or not know everything, but you should clearly not be an imposter and you should be confident in your ability to improve and understand what you don't understand yet.

Take responsabilities and ownership in what you do, don't get behind the easy excuse that it's too complicated. You are the professional and you are getting paid for this.

DrBazza
0 replies
4h10m

From 30+ years of dev work:

- There is no substitute for doing. Less tutorials, more coding.

I'd rephrase that as "just write something!"

Many times I find myself being the classic example of 'perfect is the enemy of good' - I'll think about the perfect solution, rather than write something *now*, that works, and refactor towards perfect. TDD and all that.

Other things:

- Beware the beta and the boss. If it works, it will invariably get shipped if your manager sees it. Many managers cannot put a value on the future cost of maintaining something that's barely good enough.

- Classic Confucius: "I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand." If you're interested enough to read about some tech/language/framework, write something (again!).

- Learn at least one other language and ecosystem in addition to your main one. Even if it is syntactically similar (C++, Java, C#, for example).

trustno2
31 replies
5h42m

The one thing I disagree is the thing about editors.

When I began coding I spent hours tweaking my vimrc file and learning all the essentially random shortcuts, and dealing with the absurdities of vimscript. (and debugging vim plugins that broke each other.) It felt like actual work while I was producing nothing.

Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away. Who cares about editors, vscode is good enough.

But maybe just vim sucks and I should have been playing with emacs all along, I don't know.

bregma
5 replies
5h16m

I just open vi with default settings and am productive right away. I tried VS Code and couldn't get a "hello world" example to run out of the box after a half hour of trying.

Who cares about other editors, vi is good enough.

trustno2
2 replies
5h11m

And it's fine. Do what works for you. I just don't think playing with editor endlessly is a well spent time. It makes you feel like you do actual work when you don't. In my opinion.

naught0
0 replies
3h9m

These days you can write your neovim config in a real language -- lua. I used a pre-defined config called Lazy that does everything vscode can. Then I started tweaking shortcuts, removing and adding plugins, learning more lua.

Then, after I knew what I wanted, I wrote my config from scratch with only the plugins and settings and keybinds I wanted.

It was a very fun process for me. I enjoy simply using my editor. It makes me want to code. I don't get that same level of joy or customization from vscode -- which is phenomenal software btw.

e: replied to the wrong comment in the chain, but the point stands! Customization is how I got into programming. Crafting a status bar on linux, tweaking colorschemes, etc. Don't hate on the tinkerers just because it's not how you enjoy to work. It can be immensely valuable

lemonwaterlime
0 replies
4h51m

You only play with the editor endlessly if you’re the type of person to play with the editor endlessly.

My vimrc was set up over the years a bit at a time based on my needs. After several years, I did an overhaul based on what I truly need and don’t need from experience. I rarely change anything in it these days. Maybe a few lines if I start using a new language.

With that stated, most of my vim use is still understanding buffers and motions, which takes no configuration.

g15jv2dp
0 replies
2h52m

I just open vi with default settings and am productive right away. I tried VS Code and couldn't get a "hello world" example to run out of the box after a half hour of trying.

I take it that you've learned vim (otherwise you wouldn't be "productive right away" - you wouldn't even know how to input text or save a file) whereas you had apparently never tried vscode before. How can that be a fair comparison?

TillE
0 replies
2h27m

The VS Code launch settings crap is a mess. But like as an editor, it's an editor. You can just use it like that. It works well and has good defaults, you can open a terminal with a hotkey, etc.

bobajeff
5 replies
5h10m

Same here. I don't spend most of my time typing but rather thinking. So getting good at vim or getting faster at typing will not make me any better. That's not to say that I'm not in favor of being good at typing. I know my keyboard well enough to touch type also I know some keyboard short cuts specific to vscode but they are intuitive and have a GUI alternative if I don't feel like using them.

trustno2
1 replies
5h8m

One of my colleagues was using dvorak and arguing that because he types faster with it, he's a better programmer.

i never thought typing speed is all that important when you code. But he DID write crazy fast.

j45
0 replies
1h37m

Typing fast is an interesting metric.

Shipping the same code will happen sooner if you have tooling and typing setup to allow for quick iterations, and being quick in making those iterations. Selecting a language/framework that might take more work can slow you down too.

Typing faster does seem to look towards thinking faster, trouble shooting faster.

One place where it can get someone into trouble is typing too fast, faster than it might take to think through and not over look something which might invalidate what you're doing.

I have all hires do typeracer.com. Not for a high or a low score, but seeing the development of the score and understanding the importance of typing fast relating to thinking fast.

Typing code inherently is slower than writing sentences, so if you can type faster sentences in written communication, typing code will be faster, even if it's not at the full typing speed.

tdumitrescu
1 replies
1h33m

I think everyone's got a different threshold for where returns start diminishing sharply. While I'm squarely in the "don't waste time micro-tweaking your editor" camp, there are some little bits of shortcuts and tooling that made me much more fluent at code-editing with very little investment. One example that stands out is the multi-cursor support that Sublime Text popularized (and which I use all the time in vscode now). It eliminates a good 80% of repetitive typing, or symbol refactoring that would have involved clunking through menus in old IDEs, and makes experimentation that much quicker. Feels fundamental, like copy/paste shortcuts which everyone knows now.

nox101
0 replies
1h8m

more than multi-cursor, recordable keyboard macros save me a ton of time. I miss them sorely in vscode

bcrosby95
0 replies
1h1m

For me it depends upon the task.

If I have to hunt down a bug or have something with a lot of touch points, yeah, there's probably less typing and more thinking.

But if it's a new mostly self contained feature usually I think for a bit, then get to the point where I know what I need to build and the next step is about shitting out a mountain of code. Being able to go from nothing -> mountain in a fast time is useful.

farmeroy
2 replies
2h10m

I've been using neovim pretty much since I began programming. I had some initial setup and have tweaked it once or twice, but it's by no means been a source of sunk time for me. I recently had to switch to VSCode and had a lot of issues learning all the out of the box key bindings and not having the telescope and fuzzy find windows I was used to was a huge productivity loss for me. When I able to jump back to neovim it was such a huge relief.

j45
1 replies
1h33m

I'm reasonably familiar with both and use them for different cases than each other. vscode at least is my text editor in the gui... but consistently growing :)

The time getting up to speed on something new shouldn't be used against something else that is already familiar.

Now if the new tool (ie., vscode) could import your neovim setup and get you an equivalent, that would be neat.

Comparing the sunk cost time for neovim vs vscode might be a more interesting comparison. Neovim definitely is a little more polished than vim out of the box so it's entirely plausible it's pretty close.

If a vim user wanted to learn something like vscode, they could just install a vim extension in vscode to navigate most of vscode in vim keys. Lots on youtube.

It's hard to use a web browser without a vim extension installed.

It's true if you have sunk the time to super customize a setup for you in anything (currently I'm working through my Aerospace setup), the part that I get caught by sometimes is that something I had to customize in neovim, might already be built into vscode, or something else, or vice versa.

Repetitions is about creating the muscle memory, similar to building the same keys with vim.

I'm lucky I was able to get to a place of comfort with vim when I had lots of free time.

It's great when I don't have my setup with me, but my setup with neovim was a step forward, but vscode still sometimes just ends up where I am, and I figure out how to get it behaving a little better.

farmeroy
0 replies
57m

I guess my point was that, often times people say some tool (or language, or anything) is easier when what they really mean is that they are used to it.

The fact is, you use something because it resonates with you (or its the only resource you have) and then you get good at it, and then everything else becomes a handicap

DavidWoof
2 replies
4h38m

I don't think this point is about configuring your editor/environment as much as just knowing it. There's certain features that come up all the time: find file, find class, go to implementation, find references, rename var, etc.

It stuns me how many devs do this stuff manually, when virtually all editors/ides have ways of doing these things.

darby_nine
1 replies
4h23m

In some ecosystems, the tooling is just not that good. To use ruby on rails as an example: if you lean into the IDE's expectations for code layout it works ok, but there will always be generated methods and variables with nothing to show but the name—no documentation, no source, no googleable identifier, nothing. In these cases there's nothing to do but pull out the rails (or library) source to try and discern their intention.

In my experience, lisp also has this issue of being very difficult to tool in a general sense, as did aspects of writing c/c++ years ago (maybe recognizing stuff like macro-generated symbols has improved by now).

skydhash
0 replies
1h59m

lisp also has this issue of being very difficult to tool in a general sense

Most of the common lisp tooling is already present in the language itself. Things like inspect, trace, describe and apropos already gives you the equivalent of most IDEs. I agree with you for some dynamic language and magic methods. It can be hard to trace back the exact function that are being called. But you can always design some tooling for it as long as the code follows the ecosystem convention (Laravel plugin in PhpStorm).

The nice thing about Vim (and other configurable editors) is how easy to mesh existing tooling with the editor itself, without requiring for that extension to be a whole project unto itself.

posix86
1 replies
4h58m

VSCode can also be used more or less effectively though. There are quite a few shortcuts & tricks that can make you 10x more productive, even if maybe it's not as much as vim.

sethammons
0 replies
2h10m

Multi-cursor on ten lines, sure. You get 10x for some seconds or maybe minutes. I'd expect practically zero people have gotten 3x more productive over a two week period for having advanced knowledge of tips and tricks in their editor. Saying 10x seems a wild exaggeration

Chris_Newton
1 replies
3h7m

Possibly my all-time favourite XKCD, Is it worth the time?¹, demonstrates two important points. If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI. But for things you do moderately often that take a minute or even just a few seconds, you can afford to spend a surprisingly large amount of time optimising them and still get a big pay-off over a time frame measured in years.

I view time spent learning to use my tools efficiently and automating common tasks as a sound investment. Editors are a great example. Sure, I could fire up any of the usual suspects and write code somewhat productively. But in my fully customised editor of choice, I can insert and adapt common code patterns that would take me 10–30 seconds to type out fully in mere moments using templates and macros. I can jump to any position visible on-screen with around three keystrokes. I can see syntax highlighting for various file types that I use all the time, including some unusual ones that don’t have definitions readily available, and warnings for several different programming languages in real time as I work.

These save me a few seconds every time I use them, but how many times is that every day? The effort to set them up has probably repaid itself 100x over by now! And the lack of latency is also a qualitative improvement since it means once I’m ready to start writing, I can do so roughly as fast as I can think, instead of constantly being held back and interrupted for a moment.

¹ https://xkcd.com/1205/

tdumitrescu
0 replies
1h4m

If you only do something very rarely anyway, spending time to automate it won’t have a great ROI

For code-editing, maybe. But in general software engineering, there are tasks that I have to do maybe once a year or less that are always way more painful than they need to be because I don't remember the details, and anytime I automate even part of them (or yes, just document a little better), it turns out to be well worth it. Stuff like bootstrapping new environments, some database-related work, etc.

wruza
0 replies
25m

Now I just open vscode with default settings and I am productive right away.

I am right away distracted by a huge rectangle around cursor line, current word highlighting and general jumpiness of everything. Coding in vscode feels like writing a book in the middle of brazilian festival. And then it cannot do random simple things like proper indents or humane snippets. The amount of work required to unfuck vscode is really comparable to creating .vimrc from scratch.

seabass-labrax
0 replies
1h29m

The author claims that a strong knowledge of development tools is a good indicator of general proficiency, but what if it's that learning how to use your editor makes you proficient? After all, nobody gets familiar with Emacs without inadvertently becoming a practitioner - if not an enthusiast - of Lisp!

That happened with me, and I'm now a big fan of functional programming, Clojure, Scheme etc., and that experience and exposure to a particular way of writing code has undoubtedly made me a better programmer. It sounds like you've had a similar experience with Vimscript :)

moonshinefe
0 replies
30m

As with most things there's a balance. I've found if I try to learn one or two new features or shortcuts every couple weeks with the tools I use extensively, eventually I do get a sharp axe.

Typing speed is nice but not an important metric I don't think. It's like someone speeding past you on the road only for you to see them at the next red light. Other things will slow you down like code review or needing to wait until a set time to deploy. Also things like copilot and advanced auto-completion are making it less relevant.

hinkley
0 replies
1h39m

I’m on the fence. When I obsessed more about Flow State, I really did see dividends from spending spare cycles reading the docs (especially release notes) and keyboard shortcut mappings to find faster ways to do things I did often.

Maybe I hit the point of diminishing returns. Maybe it’s because I don’t Code Like Hell much anymore, but it’s a habit I got out of. I keep resolving to getting back to it, but the fact I don’t maybe telling me something. Like maybe I’ve filled that spare time with other things that are more valuable.

goosejuice
0 replies
4h40m

I'm grateful that I started learning vim and C at the same time in undergrad. Sure vscode is good enough, but a lot of value is gained tweaking your own tools beyond the tool itself.

Producing something doesn't always need to be the goal. Exploration has value.

fragmede
0 replies
5h40m

When you began coding, was there vscode? These days there's lazyvim to let you skip all that fine tuning if you want to "just use vim".

corytheboyd
0 replies
3h52m

100% agree about defaults. I do think it’s critical you actually learn the features of you IDE. Yes being able to type fast has nothing to with programming, but being able to jump to symbols, make refactors, use keyboard shortcuts etc. reduces the gap between hands and brain.

coffeebeqn
0 replies
1h29m

It’s a little bit like some productivity blogs obsessing over the notepad and pens and apps they use and spending a lot of time obsessing/procrastinating over things that don’t matter. I still learn the same shortcuts I’ve used for the last 15 years in whatever editor I use but most of my time is spent thinking and talking about problems rather than just typing things in the editor

__turbobrew__
0 replies
1h32m

My productivity is rarely limited by the speed with which I can interface with a computer. Im in the same boat, I just use intellij for everything.

avanai
4 replies
2h29m

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

This is one of the main things I try to impart to junior folks when I’m mentoring them or reviewing code.

It’s also one of the biggest red flags to me of someone who’s working above their level when I have to repeatedly press a more senior person to dig deeper and fix things at a deeper level.

You need to take the time to understand why the bug happened, or you’re just going to be patching wallpaper instead of fixing the plumbing leak.

hiatus
2 replies
1h44m

You need to take the time to understand why the bug happened, or you’re just going to be patching wallpaper instead of fixing the plumbing leak.

I think many would like to probe deeper but aren't afforded the time between sprint tasks. Management often pushes back for solutions that are good enough compared to exploration with an unknown duration until the solution is found.

default-kramer
0 replies
1h37m

Of course this can vary wildly, but I've never felt afraid to defy management on that one. Half the time, they don't even need to know. And the other half of the time... what are they going to do? Fire me? Fine, then their project will be filled with nothing but wallpaper-patchers and I'll be somewhere else doing good work.

(And of course, sometimes just patching the wallpaper is the right course of action, but it's rare to find management capable of accurately assessing this trade-off.)

__turbobrew__
0 replies
1h37m

Part of being senior is figuring out how to work in those constraints. In that situation I would push back my manager and tell them why root causing bugs will save us time in the long run and if they still don’t relent I would sandbag some of my time doing sprint tasks to root cause the bugs.

hinkley
0 replies
1h45m

I’m surprised by how many people cannot handle 5 Why’s. It’s substantially the same people who like wallpaper and putty.

vitus
3 replies
4h21m

The point that resonated most with me, and that I repeat every time someone early in their career asks for advice (or one thing I wish I had been told when I first started out) is "When working on a team, you should usually ask the question".

Early in my career, I spent a lot of time reading unclear or obsolete documentation, poring over code, etc, when I could have asked the person sitting next to me and gotten an answer in 5 minutes. Sometimes, I didn't even know who the right person to ask was, but if I had just asked my tech lead, he would have been able to point me in the right direction.

Claiming that it reduces your overall time from several hours to < 5 minutes is maybe a bit exaggerated, since it also takes time to figure out what question you want to ask in the first place. But it's still worthwhile even if you end up investigating for 30 minutes instead of 3 hours.

pavel_lishin
2 replies
4h6m

On the other hand, though, I really wish people would take at least ten minutes to do that digging through the code or reading through the documentation before asking.

One, reading code in general is a good thing to do when you're new, and it's a skill that should be built up in general.

Two, you might actually find what you're looking for, and answer your own question! It's a nice little boost to realize you're getting self-sufficient.

Three, you'll have a lot more context for me, which will make it easier for me to give you the answer. "Hey, how come this function doesn't return what I expected" is a much harder question to answer than "This function says it returns a list of items a user has accessed in a given workspace, but it's returning an empty list; I've checked my local database and it has a good set of seed data I think, and from looking at the function there's nothing obviously filtering out users, so what's going on?"

liampulles
1 replies
3h56m

At my first job, at a consulting company, they had a good rule, which was basically "show initiative when asking questions". What this boils down to is if you ask how to do X, you should first research and think about it, and then you can say "I think Y is how I do X, am I on the right track?"

A lot of the time, you'll answer your own question getting to Y. If not, it will save the person you're asking a bit of legwork, and show you are not trying to have them do your job for them and have respect for their time.

necrotic_comp
0 replies
3h17m

Or, even, "I see X Y Z is happening, that doesn't seem in line with the question, can we discuss it further ? "

myaccountonhn
3 replies
5h16m

This is interesting. If I were to complement the list, these are some items I’d add that helped me:

- learn functional programming. Doing that was how I finally “grokked” programming and could solve problems more easily. Before I was ready to give up.

- learn CS history. I studied UX and what I learnt was mostly one side of how to think about computing where you spoon feed users and remove things. There are other ways to conceptualize software and design, which would have left me less disillusioned.

- learn fundamentals: data structures, networking, performance, operating systems, security, unix, math. These are so neglected in the industry, and we’re left with super complex systems we don’t actually understand as a result.

bloopernova
2 replies
2h47m

"learn fundamentals: data structures, networking, performance, operating systems, security, unix, math. These are so neglected in the industry, and we’re left with super complex systems we don’t actually understand as a result."

I sometimes hold a "command line fundamentals" course for my teams. Just being able to understand the basics puts them above any team that doesn't.

You have to know the ground you're building on. Otherwise even your foundation will be faulty.

trashburger
1 replies
1h33m

Could you please share an itinerary for this? I’d also like to hold a similar course but don’t know where to start.

bloopernova
0 replies
36m

Sure thing! This assumes everyone has macOS, but isn't very mac-specific.

  * Introduction
    Quick history of Unix

  * When you log in
    Difference between login and interactive shells
    System shell files vs user shell files
    .zshenv for environment variables like PATH, EDITOR, and PAGER
    .zprofile for login shells, we don't use it
    .zshrc for interactive shells
    Your login files are scripts, and can have anything in them

  * Moving Around

  ** Where am I?
    pwd = "print working directory"
    stored in variable $PWD
    Confusingly, also called current working directory, so you may see CWD or cwd mentioned

  ** What is here?
    ls
    ls -al
    ls -alt
    . prefix to filenames makes them hidden
    . is also the current directory!
    .. means the parent directory

  ** Finding my way around
    cd
    cd -
    dirs | sed -e $'s/ /\\\n/g'

  ** Getting Help From The Man
    man 1 zshbuiltins
    manpage sections

  ** PATH
    echo $PATH | sed -e $'s/:/\\\n/g'
    zshenv PATH setting

  ** Environment Variables
    env | sort
    EDITOR variable

  ** History
    ctrl-r vs up arrow

  ** Permissions
    Making something executable

  ** Prompts
    zsh promptinit
    zsh prompt -l

  ** Pipes
    Iterate to show how pipes work
    cat ~/.zshrc | grep PATH

  ** Commands

  *** BSD vs GNU commands
    BSD are supplied by Apple, and Apple often uses old versions
    GNU are installed via homebrew, and match those commands available in Linux

mannykannot
3 replies
5h2m

I like this a lot. While those commenters who say it is too advanced for novices have a point, I feel these are still issues worth thinking about - and coming back to - as they learn.

The one exception is “Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code.” My experience with bad code is that it does not tell me much; instead, it presents inscrutable and baffling mysteries. From the caveats and examples, I think the author is trying to say something rather different; something like “don’t obsess over completeness” or other concepts of ideal software - especially, I might add, dogmatic concepts of this nature.

trashburger
0 replies
1h55m

I think you got the wrong idea from that sentence; the author is talking more about the feedback you get from your end-users and/or customers, rather than development feedback a la debug info.

dgb23
0 replies
1h41m

The Bad Code advice is for people who have the tendency for perfectionism (apparently like the author 15y ago).

My advice to me: write simple, dumb, repetitive code, but make an effort to be consistent.

Consistent, dumb code is really easy to visually parse. The repetitions slide into the background and the differences stick out. The more code there is, the easier to see what goes together (data aggregates/structures), what the overall flow should be (control, conditionals, order etc.). Then it's easier to factor things out or how to express more clearly what the code does.

But again, consistency is key. The code can be "bad", but it's very beneficial to do simple edits like renaming and reordering of things, grouping them under succinct comments so the structure stays clear.

Younger me would do the opposite: inconsistent code that is complex. I think its impatience that gets in the way, rushing to build abstractions and factoring out things way too early or trying out competing ways to express the same kinds of things (playing around with code).

Every programmer has their own tendencies and their own journey, so they need to hear different advice, in order to ignore it for now, but to have an AHA moment at some point when they realize why the advice was given.

andai
0 replies
56m

I think this could have been phrased as, err on the side of shipping faster.

i.e. in most cases the cost of bugs is so low that the benefits of a faster feedback loop greatly outweigh the benefits of a more rigorous development process.

(On top of that, the number of defects asymptotically approaches zero with greater effort invested, i.e. diminishing returns.)

valyala
2 replies
4h1m

My advices to new software engineers:

- Always think how to simplify the code you write, since simple code is easier to maintain and debug.

- Prefer writing dumb code than smart code. Smart code is good for programming contests. Smart code is very bad in production when it needs to be debugged or refactored.

- Always think about improving the usability of the software product you work on. Users don't care about code. They care about UX of your product.

- Fix small usability issues as soon as you notice them, since these issues are usually the most annoying for end users.

- Do not start writing code with some popular design patterns. Just write the most simple code, which resolves the given task. Later, the best design patterns will evolve organically from the code solving the particular task.

VictoriaMetrics development goals are based on these rules - https://docs.victoriametrics.com/goals/

necrotic_comp
0 replies
3h42m

I go a step further on "dumb code". Write code that is easy to reason about, understand, and grok the implications of.

I spent a ton of time doing support and engineering on a trading desk, where our SLA for an outage was somewhere in the range of 30 seconds to 5 minutes. Having super simple code that makes it easy to understand what the code problem is (if not necessarily the business problem) lets you move on with life and let the business keep moving.

lukan
0 replies
3h40m

Or in short, KISS!

(Keep it simple stupid!)

And yes, users will notice the button that is only half visible quite a bit more, than a suboptimal sort algorithm.

Anduia
2 replies
2h2m

Funny how he casually mentions JIRA as a process that slows you down. I get that his team does the issue tracking somewhere else?

What does people use that is faster to process both for devs and the PM?

skydhash
1 replies
1h41m

It always depends on the team. And by team, I mean the people working on a somewhat independent part of the project (they don’t need to care about the minutia of some other parts). Issue tracking is a tool, but project managers always wants the tool to become the process. And that’s when you got daily standups, story points, epics, and fixed sprints (aka fake deadlines).

Use the tool as a tool. As the devs, add issue and tasks that needs the attention of the team, comments on a ticket for knowledge retention. As the manager, schedule the ticket if its completion matters in a particular timeframe, use assignments and other fields to manage workload. Do all of these to help the team get things done. Anything else is a hindrance.

Anduia
0 replies
39m

Correct, but JIRA is not SCRUM.

Why does the author mention JIRA as a process? Does he find it slow or convoluted compared to other tools? Or does he think that using JIRA means a PM is forcing the team to follow an unwanted process?

999900000999
2 replies
1h5m

I'll add one point. You are not your job. Don't take things personally at work. And never be afraid to leave if you're not fitting in with your company .

I've left jobs over a few reasons, primarily bad managers, increased compensation, and bad code .

If people are writing bad code at your company, to the point where you know it's going to come back to haunt you later, it's okay to just walk away .

Don't embarrass anybody, don't escalate to a manager and explain how horrible the code is. I was in a situation where someone our team was effectively writing code that pretended to do things it really didn't. I got into a really nasty argument with half my team about this. I ended up putting in my two weeks, and then my manager was like oh you were right the entire time .

Life is too short to deal with incompetent people.

oblio
1 replies
46m

Unless you have a lot of flexibility in terms of where you work, this type of advice is becoming less relevant in an IT job market that's in free fall.

Much fewer devs can just jump ship at will than between 2003 - 2022.

999900000999
0 replies
17m

In my situation it would have been much easier to just keep my head down until I was able to get another job. I ended up causing a lot of tension at work, the engineer who had wrote this code openly resented me .

Usually when people are putting broken code into the code base it's a wider cultural problem, that you're not realistically going to solve.

wruza
1 replies
5h14m

Not sure what 15 years means, but if that’s where I started:

(Blasphemies warning)

- Skip low level and go as high as you can. Ditch C, assembly, hardware. Take python, ruby, js. Never touched C++ cause it’s awful? Good.

- All the money is in the hands of a client. If you’re taking it from someone else, best case you’re taking less than a quarter for essentially the same job. Useless leeches everywhere who perceive you as a magic money generator. Go around them once you’re confident.

- Read sicp, htdp, taoup, but don’t take them to heart. Seriously, extensively test any idea you learn against reality, cause ideas may sound excellent out of context.

- Pragmatic is the only way. Don’t listen to industry peasants jumping through imaginary hoops, they are crazy. Religion in programming is worse than religion irl. There’s insane amount of it in programming. Don’t argue, let them be. It’s actually easy to test approaches by yourself and learn your own ways. Most of these are just habits making no difference once learned.

- Doing something together only turns out faster if you’re very good communicators. Good communicators are rare and you are not the one.

93po
0 replies
3h21m

All the money is in the hands of a client. If you’re taking it from someone else, best case you’re taking less than a quarter for essentially the same job. Useless leeches everywhere who perceive you as a magic money generator. Go around them once you’re confident.

My better advice would be to avoid work that involves outside clients unless you own your own shop or freelance for yourself. They're always going to be price and deadline sensitive in a way that makes for shittier work conditions and lower pay. Working on well-funded internal projects that generate revenue is the way to go. Your work conditions are also going to be much nicer because a client being an asshole can't be used as an excuse for constant overtime or other BS.

supriyo-biswas
1 replies
4h6m

I wish more articles talked about the usefulness of integration tests over unit tests. Personally, I feel that unit tests are overrated and rarely give the required confidence to inform the team whether something is ship ready, whereas integration tests on the common workflows means that even when a bug is introduced, very few users are affected.

sethammons
0 replies
1h55m

So much this. I have been at a few shops now that feel their integration tests are ok and their unit tests are proving >90% coverage and yet they break the login or auth flow weekly. An absolute aversion to e2e tests. As soon as I can make a test log in and create and read one record, and bake that into the release process (preferably gating merge to main and after deployment artifact generation) then the site no longer breaks every week. Customer pain and hours of dev work saved.

photochemsyn
1 replies
4h25m

"It’s really easy to write terrible code. But it’s also really easy to write code that follows absolutely every best practice, with 100% test coverage, and has been fuzz-tested and mutation-tested for good measure – your startup will just run out of money before you finish. So a lot of programming is figuring out the balance."

The situation appears to be changing rapidly. 15 years ago there were no advanced code-generating LLMs, and while relying on them for the core logic without having a good understanding of the language and system is still a bit iffy, it does seem that they're pretty good for generating tests and spotting deviations from whatever your group has decided are best practices.

farmeroy
0 replies
3h41m

What sort of tests does it seem good at generating? I was hoping it would give me a decent start writing tests with Jest and React Testing Library for an already existing but untested codebase. It seemed ok at small components that I can also quickly write tests for, but the larger, messier things would receive useless, failing tests.

hamasho
1 replies
5h50m

Most of this advice has already clicked with me, but this part:

If you can't easily explain why something is difficult, then it's incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

That's a real eye-opener. Hope I remember this next time I implement something complex. The thing is, I don't think this stuff would've helped me much when I was a junior dev. A lot of them are just too nuanced.

j45
0 replies
1h41m

'Addressing' can be ambiguous. Writing comments to explain why it's right and needs to be this way? Or changing the code without considering if they have enough knowledge of the rest of the codebase.

There's also a chance it's not understood yet to easily explain it.

A key part of joining a team is remaining open to the fact that just because I don't understand something, doesn't mean there isn't understanding in it.

austin-cheney
1 replies
20m

The one piece of advice I would give myself 15 years ago:

In the corporate world be very good at administration. You only need to just be good enough at programming to not get fired. Everybody has opinions on software techniques and nobody measures anything, so it’s really just a popularity/tool game. The only goals are retain employment or promote out of software, being good at software is just a distraction from the goals.

If you want to be excellent at programming do it as a hobby and set your expectations right that it’s only a hobby.

bigdict
0 replies
17m

Could you expand a bit on what you mean by administration?

Scubabear68
1 replies
3h41m

The author’s comments about knowing your business context and the potential impact of bugs really hit home with me.

I have seen far too many teams using Facebook sized solutions for a few thousand users.

I’ve seen developers slowed to an absolute crawl, terrified of shipping code, for a completely secondary operational platform with low volumes and non-critical data. All because the product people were misguided in their mission.

And sadly, I’ve seen teams with almost non-existent security practices and knowledge happily banging out crap in financial services environments.

And I’ve been blessed with teams understanding their position and fully embracing it. Financial services products with quarterly releases that were rock solid and well architected. Batch document processing systems with just a few dozen end users who worked closely with us developers to tune algorithms where sometimes we would ship multiple times in a day and re run batches in production.

To be successful, teams gotta know if you’re at NASA level, or life threatening, or business critical, or somewhat critical, or just nice tooling, plus understand the cash flow / budget situation. As a dev you may not be privy to all that, but strive to know as much of this as you can.

And of course, understand who you users are, and who your customers are, and prioritize accordingly.

trashburger
0 replies
1h45m

I am personally at the “nice tooling” level, but am currently building towards supporting other teams at the “business critical” level, so I try to apply the same rigour to everything that I do. It might make sense to also consider your dependents in similar scenarios.

yowlingcat
0 replies
1h59m

Agree with sibling comment saying these are too abstract. Here are mine:

Fundamentals:

- Ecosystem beats language and syntax

- Use boring, battle tested technologies

- Use the relational database to do the heavy lifting

- Avoid caching unless you have a great reason

- Code cleanliness comes from simplicity, not elegance

- There's higher leverage from improved code reading ability over writing ability

Professional:

- You grow faster building in good industries over interesting codebases

- There's higher leverage from improving the business over improving the code

- There's higher leverage in finding mentorship over being an autodidact

- Make T-shaped buy vs build calls: build the secret sauce, try to buy the rest

Probably leaving a bunch out.

whatsakandr
0 replies
3h34m

A variant on that I say on one of these is "Do the dumb thing" thing to find the right abstraction. I've seen so mucb code that didn't need to be written if someone had just done the dumb thing. On the flip side, I've also seen so much code that could be so much simpler if after writing the dumb solution, they went back and figured out a better one. I guess the takeaway is: Prototype.

tossandthrow
0 replies
4h55m

Spending time sharpening the axe is almost always worth it

I hear this advice constantly. But I feel like it really need to be qualified. I have been in projects that never saw any real value produced because people constantly focused on DX, projects management, and other tools.

Sometimes one just needs to do with tools at hand, and not worry if there are better tools.

theideaofcoffee
0 replies
4h34m

If you (or your team) are shooting yourselves in the foot constantly, fix the gun

This is a reasonable step to take if you're working in a reasonable company with reasonable "management". If you're unlucky enough to be working under a manager that refuses to recognize there is a problem, even with compelling data, prepare for pain. In that case nothing is allowed to be done because "well, that's how we've always done it and doing something about it might upset someone". It's really time to quit and find something new at that point because there is generally no hope of turning that around.

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing

See above. "That's how we've always done it, and someone is used to that work flow, so we can't change it." Sometimes this will lead to a legitimate Chesterton's Fence situation, in which case you'd want to regroup and rethink it. Otherwise, the batshit insane is the default. Target the latter.

Try to solve bugs one layer deeper

"There is no time to do that! We have so many other projects!" While being blind to the fact (or better yet, burying their head in the sand and trying to ignore) that it's all self-induced.

Don’t underestimate the value of digging into history to investigate some bugs

"We can't change that because one of our people close to management made that decision and it might drive them away." Good, get them out, that's the only way to really fix it. Ideally if the management that hired them is pushed out too.

When working on a team, you should usually ask the question

"Who are you to question our wisdom? Who are you to suggest something else, it's working in production."

These are great things to start conversations, but you have to start them in an organization that is willing to change and be willing to take your advice to heart. Don't waste your precious life trying to change what can't be change, no matter how much you want to see it change.

stevenking86l
0 replies
2h50m

This is one of the better advice posts I’ve seen. Especially the parts about finding the balance between shipping fast and shipping bug-free code.

Too many engineers think their job is “great code writer” and not “value adder”

simonw
0 replies
5h2m

This was great. I particularly enjoyed the "Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code" section, I'd never thought about how spending time writing "perfect" code means you don't get to figure out which aspects of that code actually matter.

redevil
0 replies
1h24m

For the backend of Chessbook I have a command to copy all of a user’s data down to local, so I can reproduce issues easily with only a username

hmmmmmm

piterrro
0 replies
5h45m

If you can’t easily explain why something is difficult, then it’s incidental complexity, which is probably worth addressing.

This one is good and has been following me since I've became a manager. Thanks to you, I know how to apply that objection to "press" people when I feel we're dealing with this kind of complexity.

pharmacy7766
0 replies
4h54m

What about: buy Bitcoin?

mrits
0 replies
4h18m

I spent a ridiculous amount of hours tweaking my vim config over the last two decades. I've used vscode the last few years and rarely jump to vim to do some text manipulation (that I usually could do with a raw install)

metalrain
0 replies
4h41m

Very reasonable, solving bugs one layer deeper can be very valuable, if you don't go too deep into the rabbit hole.

megamalloc
0 replies
4h34m

Mostly pretty sound advice here, but oh, this rankles! --

"In situations where bugs aren’t mission critical (ex. 99% of web apps), you’re going to get further with shipping fast and fixing bugs fast, than taking the time to make sure you’re shipping pristine features on your first try."

In 99% of web apps, your end users have no possible way of telling you that you shipped a bug, and your bug will remain there forever, frustrating users and losing your client money as they abandon your site. Telemetry won't help you either becuase you'll misunderstand the observations it provides.

liampulles
0 replies
3h41m

"Bad code gives you feedback, perfect code doesn’t. Err on the side of writing bad code".

This is probably quite a cynical way of putting it (and it speaks to me, probably because I am quite cynical) though I don't know if a junior dev will really appreciate this.

The way I would put it is: don't seek satisfaction from trying to make perfect abstractions for business rules no one quite understands, rather seek satisfaction from making your user's lives easier as efficiently as possible.

l2dy
0 replies
5h26m

Keep doing the first sort of bug fix, and you end up with a mess.

To avoid the mess, design with the fail-fast principle in mind, which brings you closer to the spot where an error occurred.

koliber
0 replies
6h23m

I rarely see advice with which I wholly agree. This is one of those rare times that I fully agree with everything g. Good seasoned advice from someone that has been doing this fo r a while.

jakobov
0 replies
4h48m

Codeisforhumans.com

inatreecrown2
0 replies
5h12m

this is not on the content but on the website color choices for text and background: wonderfully well done, easy to read in dark mode. with this kind of sensible coloring i feel i don’t need eink devices for reading.

hinkley
0 replies
1h49m

The trick is not in having advice to offer. It’s in having advice they will hear.

Next month I’ll have been working in software for 30 years. Which means I would have a lot more common ground with me 15 years ago than most people will. that me with five years’ experience might not have understood at all.

Me with five years’ experience suspected many things that were true but missed some important one. I’d probably have to feed his ego by confirming some of those things before moving on to the difficult bits.

But who is to say that me with less Impostor Syndrome would be a better person? No, the main value in learning from the past is improving the future, not nostalgia or regrets or what ifs.

efitz
0 replies
3h43m

I loved the author's point on "incidental complexity". I would point out though, that even if you CAN explain why something is complex doesn't mean it SHOULD be complex.

When the subject of "tech debt" comes up, I always tell the teams I work on to focus on tasks that improve our speed or agility in the future. I believe that many coding tasks actually have a negative dev cost over time, as they reduce the dev costs of future work more than they cost at the current moment to implement. (Of course the problem is that they have a positive dev cost in the current sprint, so good luck convincing decision makers...)

brainzap
0 replies
4h30m

programming is such a young field wirh many iterations that good advice is hard. I should have probaly made my own programming language!

bazoom42
0 replies
5h18m

Assess the trade-off you’re making between quality and pace

Very important! But also important to distinguish between kinds of quality. Using a sub-optimal algorithm or bad identifiers or copy-pasted code can always be fixed later. But some problems like a bad database schema is much harder to fix later.

anilakar
0 replies
1h36m

One more: Make developer velocity one of your top priorities.

You should be able to give anyone in your team the repo URL and have them running unit and local integration tests in five minutes without prior knowledge.

DanielVZ
0 replies
4h35m

I have one:

Learn to become comfortable implementing and working on state machines.

It might be one of the most useful abstractions out there that if implemented well leads to a great extensible design without compromising performance.

CM30
0 replies
1h40m

Seems like some good advice here! The points about digging deeper into the cause of a bug and looking at the history of the codebase for more info are really good points to keep in mind for sure.

And remembering to ask questions hits home pretty well too. There's always the worry that you're bothering people too much, and the balancing act between thinking whether you need to be asking for help early enough to make sure you're not going down the wrong path and not asking about every little thing without attempting to fix it yourself...