I think they mean something along the lines of good programmers aren’t big head know-it-alls. they admit when they don’t know something, ask for help, and collaborate as opposed to claiming to be an all knowing monolith software god. we’ve all met those guys at work.
jQuery was an essential stepping stone back when JS was lacking a ton of features that people take for granted these days.
Sure everything could have been done with Vanilla JS but it was verbose and difficult to follow. jQuery made it possible for any developer to quickly make a page dynamic
I have a good one that’s guarenteed to blow up my inbox 🎣
People who put the title of “architect” in their tech job titles are stealing valor from actual architects, and clearly doing it bc it sounds cooler than “software designer” or “coding technician” or whatever the more boring and appropriate job title would be
This is now endemic in every field, not just the tech sector, and its largely thanks to the widespread use of the term “architect” in tech
Middle-managment banking position with slight kickbacks? Please, no, I’m an “Investments Architect.” Me? No, no - I’m not just some chemist working for a shitty soda company, I’m a “Beverage Architect.” And so on
I just put “software engineer”, or “senior programmer”. It’s all the same to me.
Software Architect is an altogether different thing, although in my career I’ve had to do a bit of it, it was never a principal task. And these days that job is often driven by “Tech Director” or “Tech Lead” or the 20 other titles that don’t mean that much.
After 15 years as a “Programmer” , I’ve done architecture, design, programming, instrumentation and iteration, integration, build management, team management, and lead/director tasks. Don’t care what my title is, just pay me what I’m worth, and let me code.
There are two many programming languages and frameworks. There is a lot of doubling. Why the heck is there Dart/Flutter? Just use Javascript/TypeScript. Why Swift, when you have D, Go, Rust, Python with type annotations, etc.? In my opinion, just too much waste. Of course, in a niche, like OS development or embedded, there can be actually a need for hyper optimized special solutions. But the “mainstream” rest?
There is a lot of doubling. Why the heck is there Dart/Flutter? Just use Javascript/TypeScript.
This blend of comment was once targeted at TypeScript. Still is.
The truth of the matter is that the purpose of tools is to help people achieve their goal. JavaScript is awfully broken, and many people have been investing their time to come up with solutions to fix it. TypeScript is one of the approaches, but Dart is another one. JavaScript doesn’t go away because it’s the de facto standard to run arbitrary code in a browser, and it carries decades of legacy code. Thus people try and try. TypeScript is now on its 5th major release, and there’s still plenty of work to improve upon the mess that’s JavaScript. No wonder corporations like Google invest their resources building alternatives.
I’m not convinced that “strong pairing” is the best way to pair but even people who rail against agile ideology tell you that you’re pairing wrong if you don’t follow it precisely.
You know, I wish it wasn’t. Much of Amazon was on a version of Perl for years (and may still be) for almost all of their front end hosting. Facebook has transformed PHP into Hack (which is better for types, though technically not strongly typed), strongly suggesting they were running PHP until 2014. Let’s not forget what WordPress is still in PHP too.
Depends on the community. In Lisp communities, for example, it’s very much a hot take. Which is a shame, because I’d love a statically typed Lisp-like language.
We can feel it in our bones… And boy is it a pain when you find a huge codebase that is JS only or python without types. Fucking hell dealing with that shit
Designing good UX can be as difficult as writing good code.
Source: Im UI/UX designer and project manager and also QA/QC and also devops and also write the specs and documentation. The only thing I dont do is write the code. The hardest of all those roles is UX. The easiest is project management ("Did anything go tits-up today? No? Well carry on, then ")
Biases: I have no formal training in any of those things and was actually hired as a helpdesk tech.
I am a programmer so my own approach is to find whatever similar project had to solve the same UUx requirements, either by searching the web or from memory, and to start iterating on that. Fortunately it is pretty uncommon to have to reinvent the wheel.
Well, most of the UX designer I have worked with don’t do that, and most didn’t seem to have that much experience using softwares. I have seen some weird shit in meetings, as the “non-expert” it can be very delicate to call those bad designs repeatedly. Even basic rules like when to use radio buttons vs checkboxes are sometime broken. All people working 6 figure jobs++.
I guess I have spent too much time on the computer over the last 2 decades and played around with too many interfaces to ever be satisfied with much of anything.
Thats pretty much what I did too. With no artistic flair or training, I just copied similar software that has a good UI. While Im not great at designing one, I know a good UI when I see one.
I unironically love the look of old grey winforms, but my developers dont like it. They want to use new flashy frameworks. But much of the software I design is intended to be used by warehouse and industrial factory staff. Most are over 40. I know they feel comfortable with the old visual style of winforms, so thats what I insist on for many apps. For newer software projects, Im happy to work with something more modern, like Maui.
Designing good UX is harder than designing good UI is harder than writing good code. As a machine learning engineer, I will never be able to design UX. I have made a pretty UI once though.
PMs and UXers are the Tom Sayers of the software world, whitewashing aunt Polly’s fence and making the other kids do the work and pay for the privilege.
I am programmer turned “everything else around the code” doer. I constantly have to correct/suggest UI and UX improvements and it can be such a time sink to tell devs to change stuff for it…
Basic fundamentals of user experience design are not a given apparently. I’m sorry, you wanted to be able to tab through boxes? The enter key should work? Who would thought it.
Warm take. Engineers who don’t know engineers shouldn’t design interfaces have never had a non-engineer give feedback for their interfaces. We’re all the same kind of weirdo.
Excel is a very nice product, and I really enjoy AoE2. Even if it now has a quite large tech debt with HD the release version was super stable and a leap forward compared to its contemporaries.
Even as someone who has disliked MS since the mid-90s, I am willing to admit they have made some good products. The Intellimouse 2.0 was one of the best mice I’ve ever used. It was my main mouse for something like a decade, and even now, almost 25 years later, it still works as a backup mouse when I need it for something in my homelab.
This is a bit too extreme. I guess I’d say it’s more like… they do sometimes make something good, and then make it awkward to use outside of Windows/attach other arbitrary nonsense restrictions etc.
People won’t believe me that windows is an absoloute dumpster fire, sure it works most of the time but when it doesn’t it quickly becomes apparent how much the whole thing is creaking edifice built atop pretty much every past version of itself. I could do a whole rant.
One Note. I have yet to see anything from anyone come close. Works with all of my devices, allows me to use a stylus for designs on an infinite graph paper canvas, and damned good at note taking.
MATLAB is an okay programming language when used in the right context. It’s intended for scientific applications, so trying to do your standard object oriented programming with it gets weird. I think we forget that some things were made for a specific purpose- you know, a hammer can’t do everything and all that.
Yeah Comp Sci was a new department at my Uni when I went there, and they didn’t have the program figured out yet. So first year we had to do everything in Pascal. Second year they decided to switch to C, so we had to write everything in that. Third year they realized an object oriented language might be good to teach, so we had to do everything in C++. Last year we were doing stuff in Java.
As disorganized as it was, in the end I learned more about the concepts better than I would have if they stuck to one language all the way through. Nowadays I work mainly with C# (it pays the bills) but I never took any classes in it. Just google how to do whatever concept and get the specific syntax for the language and you’re good to go.
Every time one of my friends tries to get into programming, they always want to start with Python or they want to jump right into using a game engine. They always fail
I don’t hate python like some people do, but i think it terrible for beginners
Funny, I think C++ is literally the worst language to learn programming. I would go with JS or OCaml at first, then Rust if they need manual memory management.
I thought about explaining why, but ultimately decided against it. Felt like it would take much of the hotness out of the take :D
My rationale is that C++ not only implements pretty much every concept there is, it allows for high- as well as low-level programming. That way you can learn bottom-up or top-down… Or both! Whatever suits you. You can also use it for pretty much anything and natively on pretty much any platform. That’s especially great for students with tons of different devices who don’t know what they want to do later. And it has a lot of strange, basically deprecated stuff built in you can use as curious examples and to make the learning process more interesting.
Finally, if you can deal with C++, you can deal with anything. It is a horrible yet beautiful language.
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