Post #2396608
2025-04-04 10:52 UTC
Replies (19)
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@mahryekuh@fosstodon.org 2025-04-04 11:17
@mre@mastodon.social I only skimmed the text for now (in a rush), but these are excellent points!
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@jacobmealey@mastodon.social 2025-04-04 11:51
@mre@mastodon.social this is excellent!! I’m still a pretty green “professional” programmer - 2 years in - a lot of these I’ve had to learn the hard way, and some I hadn’t thought much about (building a reputation sticks out as one).
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@thom@fosstodon.org 2025-04-04 12:16
@mre@mastodon.social Exceptionally well written Matthias. Thanks so much for sharing that piece with us.
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@mnf@mastodon.social 2025-04-04 17:07
@mre@mastodon.social Very cool, thank you. Incidentally I'm just reading the Git book again, for the 12th time or so 😄 From personal experience I'd add: don't hang your head when a copy&paste or vibe coder finishes their story in time with everything working, while you're still reading docs. Sooner rather than later that thing they built will require maintenance...
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@silwol@chaos.social 2025-04-05 10:38
@mre@mastodon.social Thanks for this great collection of advice. One aspect that really resonates with me is the "don't guess" part. I frequently end up writing a unit test that ensures that some 3rd party code behaves in a way that it matches how I use it in my code. That prevents regressions when the 3rd party code changes behavior, and it documents the expectations instead of leaving others guessing.
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@StrangeNoises@mastodon.social 2025-04-05 11:26
@mre@mastodon.social got my best job through the ‘don’t know’ one. Had already said I was self taught, resumé has no CS in it (graduated in drama). So they asked me what polymorphism is. Said I don’t know then tried to work it out from scratch knowing English and the Java context… and was kinda right if you squint? Guy asking admitted he didn’t know either. Later, was told that got me the job. Not so much the answer but the initial ‘don’t know’. It was a bullshitter filter.
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@mirabilos@toot.mirbsd.org 2025-04-05 12:36
@mre@mastodon.social it’s mostly a nice post but… Before you know it, they become the go-to person in the team for whatever they touched. … this isn’t a good thing, at least at scale. The computing field is large enough, one has to have things one won’t touch voluntarily (yet they tend to shift over time, but it’s still useful to know what’s shit, perhaps because one has already looked at it before the hype began).
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@helmutstrasser@mstdn.social 2025-04-05 18:50
@mre@mastodon.social Brilliant! I like it!
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@danielsiepmann@friendica.daniel-siepmann.de 2025-04-06 05:41
@mre@mastodon.social Thanks for writing and sharing. Reminds me of pragprog.com/titles/tpp20/the-… which was the bible for myself when I started. You have many things in common.
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@swallez@mastodon.tetaneutral.net 2025-04-06 07:33
@mre@mastodon.social I resonate so much will all of that! Thanks!
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@sanityinc@hachyderm.io 2025-04-06 10:11
@mre@mastodon.social Excellent post, totally agree! Layout on mobile squashes the text into a narrow column btw, might be worth taking a look. (Firefox reader mode didn't work either.)
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@pnie@hostsharing.coop 2025-04-06 15:00
@mre@mastodon.social well written, mostly sounds familiar to me. :->
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@artfulrobot@fosstodon.org 2025-04-07 21:48
@mre@mastodon.social I've only been programming for about 40 years so I'm still grateful for beginners advice! Thanks for sharing!
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@TimWardCam@c.im 2025-04-12 10:51
@mre@mastodon.social "Read the reference" - yeah, right. If I knew the *name* of the thing I wanted to call that's already 99% of the job done. Sure, once I've found out the name I can look up how to call it, but it's finding the name that's the hard part.
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@crypticcelery@chaos.social 2025-04-12 12:57
@mre@mastodon.social definitely an interesting read, thanks! It is weird reading that, and both being like “maybe I should find the time to do more of this” and also “I think I might be doing that but *impostor syndrome*”. One thing I will empasize, which plays into getting hands dirty and don’t guess, is: mess around. Wonder what that thingie does if Y? Do Y, find out. I have seen many people who need encouragement to just try something, which is strange…
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@TobiasFrech@ijug.social 2025-04-13 20:15
@mre@mastodon.social excellent points! If I am new to a team I first try to "Build a Reputation". It's an excellent basis to then "Say 'I Don’t Know'". By this I hope to break down the barrier so that the team is enabled to learn new things and come up with new and better solutions.
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@RandyClayton@techhub.social 2025-04-16 14:34
@mre@mastodon.social re: Read the Reference — you’ll learn things you need to know, but won’t know you’ll need to know until much, much later. This is one of the limitations in consulting a search engine for an answer. All your points are good, this one in particular resonated with me. Thanks!!
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@deckelmouck@chaos.social 2025-04-19 18:22
@mre@mastodon.social nice to read and well written.. I got some points and now I want to dig deeper in some parts ;) some side projects should be cleaned from dust 👨🏻💻
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@mukuljangra@mastodon.social 2025-04-23 16:40
@mre@mastodon.social Very well written and some rational points. Nice @mre@mastodon.social