I have no fear of implementing anything I'm asked to in typescript go rust java c# f# or nix... They're all the same tool just kinda different in some places.
this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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I've been writing code for 25+ years, and in tech for 27+.
I'm a novice at all languages still. Even though they tell me I'm a Principal Engineer.
There's always some new technique or way to do what I want that's better I'm learning every day. It never stops. The expectations for what I consider to be good code just continues to climb every day.
I try to tell this to all young guns getting in.
The amount of information due the dearth and depth of theory, practical, and abstraction I would need to where I'm comfortable enough to consider myself an expert would take a lifetime to learn.
Hence, it's, "Stay in the dojo, padawan!"
novice still learning everyday
After 6 years of seriously using Python regularly, I'd probably give myself a 6/10. I feel comfortable with best practices and making informed design decisions. I have no problem using linting and testing tools. And I've contributed to large open source projects. I could improve a lot by learning more about the standard library and some core computer science concepts that inform the design of the language. I'm pretty weak in web frameworks too, unfortunately.
After 3-4 years of using python I'm bumping you up to a 7 so I can fit in at a 5. Congrats on your upgrade. I've never contributed to open source but I've fixed issues in publocly archived tools so that they aren't buggy for my team. I can see errors and know what likely caused them and my code literacy is decent. That being said, I think I'm far from advanced.
With about 12 years in my primary language I'd say my expertise is expressed in knowing exactly what to Google..
This is probably the true highest level of expertise you'll get out of most professional coders.
It takes a real monk level of confinement to understanding the language to break out of being proficient in looking shit up and start being proficient in being the person that writes the shit people are looking up.
After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid "still don't know enough" out of 10.
After almost 12~15 years of programming in C and C++, I would give myself a solid "still don't know enough" out of 10.
That resonates so thoroughly.
And while it can 100% also be the case in any tool or language, it's somehow 300% true for C and C++.
Good enough to make my own things or mod things.
But not good enough to get a job as a programmer.
But not good enough to get a job as a programmer.
This is as weird of a time for getting hired as a programmer as we have ever had. Hang in there. Once we let AI deployment pipelines start causing production outages and shareholder bankruptcies, we will start falling over ourselves to hire human programmers again.
Feels good to hear this. I'm also struggling to enter the industry and it's nice to read something hopeful for a change
I mean that it's quite a leap going from making, like, a text-based adventure in C++ or BASIC and changing/adding lines of code to someone else's thing making mods to doing actual, professional level programming of systems I have never even fucked with for fun. Like, I can't make the screen display an image. I don't know how to do any sort of networking, at least from a programming standpoint (hardware and shit, no problem; I was CISCO and A+ certified at one point).
I guess if all they need me to do is make what is essentially a database or calculator, I could do that. 🤷🏻♂️
That's the beauty of programming (and lots of skills, really) - once we master the basics, all we tend to notice is what we haven't learned yet.
It's hard on our confidence, but there's also a perverse beauty to it.
It is a big leap, but it's the kind of leap that gets easy when doing the job with training for dozens of hours per week.
And it's also a very small leap compared to the average computer user who doesn't know why smoke shouldn't come out of the computer case during normal operation.
One of the cool things that AI will do is once again lower the barrier of entry for full time programmers.
We're on our way to finding out just how terrible AI is as a pilot, but it makes a damn fine co-pilot much of the time. And it'll be key in welcoming in and enabling our next batch of brilliant full time programmers.
Being proficient isn't about getting something right the first time, it's about how easily you recognize something as wrong and knowing how to get the knowledge to fix it. Under that definition I rate myself 5/5 if I'm not trying to be humble or sorry about tiny details.
8/10 Server-side JavaScript
7/10 Ampscript
3/10 SQL
There is something about SQL that I can't get to click with me. I can run basic queries and aggregation, but I can never get nested queries to work right.
All of these also assume I have access to documentation. Without documentation, all of them are like a 2. 🤷
I have advice that you didn't ask for at all!
SQL's declarative ordering annoys me too. In most languages you order things based on when you want them to happen, SQL doesn't work like that- you need to order query dyntax based on where that bit goes according to the rules of SQL. It's meant to aid readability, some people like it a lot,but for me it's just a bunch of extra rules to remember.
Anyway, for nested expressions, I think CTEs make stuff a lot easier, and SQL query optimisers mean you probably shouldn't have to worry about performance.
I.e. instead of:
SELECT
one.col_a,
two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN
(SELECT * FROM somewhere WHERE something) as two
ON one.x = two.x
you can do this:
WITH two as (
SELECT * FROM somewhere
WHERE something
)
SELECT
one.col_a,
two.col_b
FROM one
LEFT JOIN two
ON one.x = two.x
Especially when things are a little gnarly with lots of nested CTEs, this style makes stuff a tonne easier to reason with.
I'm 100% going to try this, but I have a feeling that it isn't going to work in my application. Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses some pared-down old version of Transact-SQL and about half of the functions you'd expect to work just flat out don't.
The joys of using a Salesforce product.
Oh boy, have fun! CTEs have pretty wide support, so you might be in luck (well at least in that respect, in all other cases you're still using saleforce amd my commiserations are with you)
Salesforce just gives me the other kind of CTE.
I loathe debugging ampscript and anything to do with marketing cloud with a passion..
Wrap the Ampscript in an ssjs try/catch block and debug all your shit on a cloudpage. ;)
Everyone that works in SFMC for an extended period of time hates SFMC. Or at least has a love hate relationship with it. I think Salesforce is the most worthless company in existence and John Mulaney's anti-SF rant at Dreamforce brought a little light to my life.
I very rarely actually use Ampscript anymore. Almost everything is done in ssjs in my instance. Thank fuck I'm not consulting anymore and don't have to deal with other company's stuff.
I'm probably at about a 1/10 in ampscript. I just don't use it enough. I tried something like what you are describing but it didn't work very well. Trying to debug ampscript that runs in an email template at send time by copying into a cloud page and then trying to mimick the various properties only available at send time was just maddening. I can't comprehend how Salesforce bought such a buggy and poorly thought through piece of junk. It's a coin toss whether some of the main menus even load half the time. Ergh...
Yeah, you still have to draw in all those values through lookups or just set the variables manually but if you keep getting a failed send or that shitty 500 error on a cloudpage, the try/catch block prevents it and will actually display the error. Should look something like this:
%%[ your AMPscript block goes here ]%%
SFMC is Salesforce's red headed stepchild. The product has been neglected into the ground and they keep shoehorning random shit into it then neglecting that, too. Ad Studio, Social Studio, and Interaction Studio were all different things they bought and slapped a coat of SF branded paint on then let die. It is such a weird product but EVERYONE has it and it gives me pretty good job security knowing how to make it function about half the time.
I've learned a lot by breaking things. By making mistakes and watching other people make mistakes. I've writing some blog posts that make me look real smart.
But mostly just bang code together until it works. Run tests and perf stuff until it looks good. It's time. I have the time to write it up. And check back on what was really happening.
But I still mostly learn by suffering.
But I still mostly learn by suffering.
That resonates so much. Almost every time someone is deeply impressed with something I know, it brings back a painful memory of how I learned it.
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Knowing the footguns in your language is always useful. The more you know, the less you’ll shoot your foot.
I think that one of my issue is that I'd like to be more knowledgeable to the smaller bits and bytes of C, but I don't have the time at work to go deeper and I don't have any free time because I have young kids.
I don't have any free time because I have young kids.
That's a healthy thing to acknowledge.
It's a brutal phase for professional development, hobbies, free time, sex, basic housekeeping...
It gets better as the little ones grow.
At least, we know emotionally that it will get better with the second one haha, even if the day to day is rought.
With the first one, it felt like we would never get to the other side of it. But we did and we will for the second one.
I am eager to learn new things, so having so little free time is definitely tough. And the lack of sleep/energy makes it even harder.
Thanks for the encouragement, it's nice to be acknowledged by someone else that went through the same thing. We often forget that we are not alone and a lot of people got through it before us.
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how do you rate yourself in your most used language?
I know things that no human should have to carry the knowledge of
Do you understand the subtilities and the nuance of your language?
My soul is scarred by the nuanced minutia of many an RFC.
in the hope of reducing my imposter syndrome.
There's but two types in software - those who have lived to see too much...and those who haven't...yet.
I should know more about what's happening under the hood.
You've just identified the most important skill of any software developer, IMO.
The three most valuable topics I learned in college were OS design basics, assembly language, and algorithms. They're universal, and once you have a grasp on those, a lot off programming language specifics become fairly transparent.
An area where those don't help are paradigm specifics: there's theory behind functional programming and OO programming which, if you don't understand, won't impeded you from writing in that language, but will almost certainly result in really bad code. And, depending on your focus, it can be necessary to have domain knowledge: financial, networking, graphics.
But for what you're taking about, those three topics cover most of what you need to intuit how languages do what they do - and, especially C, because it's only slightly higher level than assembly.
Assembly informs CPU architecture and operations. If you understand that, you mostly understand how CPUs work, as much as you need to to be a programmer.
OS design informs how various hardware components interact, again, enough to understand what higher level languages are doing.
Algorithms... well, you can derive algorithms from assembly, but a lot of smart people have already done a ton of work in the field, and it's silly to try to redo that work. And, units you're very special, you probably won't do as good a job as they've done.
Once you have those, all languages are just syntactic sugar. Sure, the JVM has peculiarities in how its garbage collection works; you tend to learn that sort of stuff from experience. But a hash table is a hash table in any language, and they all have to deal with the same fundamental issues of hash tables: hashing, conflict resolution, and space allocation. There are no short cuts.
Any good resources you can share for/on each topic?
College.
I'm one of those folks who believes not everyone needs a degree, and we need to do more to normalize and encourage people who have no interest in STEM fields to go to trade schools. However, I do firmly believe computer programming is a STEM field and is best served by getting a degree.
There are certainly computer programming savants, but most people are not, and the next best thing is a good, solid higher education.
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In C in particular, you have to be very cognizant of the tricky ways the language can screw you with UB. You might want to try some verification tools like Frama-C, use UB sanitizers, enable all the compiler warnings and traps that you can, etc. Other than that, I think using too many obscure features of a language is an antipattern. Just stick with the idioms that you see in other code. Take reviewer comments on board, and write lots of code so you come to feel fluent.
Added: the MISRA C guidelines for embedded C tell you to stay with a relatively safe subset of the language. They are mostly wise, so you might want to use them.
Added: is your issue with C or with machine code? If you're programming small MCUs, then yes, you should develop some familiarity with machine code and hardware level programming. That may also help you get more comfortable with C.
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A one out of ten. I consider myself the world's second worst programmer.
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I would give myself a solid 4.2/5 on python.
- I have in deepth knowledge of more than a few popular libraries including flask, django, marshmallow, typer, sqlalchemy, pandas, numpy, and many more.
- I have authored a few libraries.
- I have been keeping up with PEPs, and sometimes offered my feedback.
- I have knowledge of the internals of development tooling, including mypy, pylint, black, and a pycharm plugin I have created.
I wouldn't give myself a 5/5 since I would consider that an attainable level of expertise, with maybe a few expections around the globe. IMO the fun part of being really good at something is that you understand there still is to learn ❤️
Better than many, mediocre.
With my coworkers I've got a strange ability to pick up any language that tastes like c, and get stuff done. I'm sure I've confused our c# guys when I make a change to their code and ask for a code review, because I'll chase down quality of life improvements for myself. (Generally, I will make the change and ask if I have any unintended side effects, because in an MCU, I know what all my side effects are, multi threaded application?, not at all)
Edit: coming from a firmware view, I've made enough mistakes to realize when order of operations will stab me, when a branch is bad because that pipeline hit will hurt, and I still get & vs && wrong more often than I would like to admit.
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If you step in enough shit you eventually learn to realise when you are about to step in it again. I think the most knowledgeable people are those that have failed the most and found something helpful along the way, seems you are well on your journey so just keep steeping. At some point the abstractions you have control over become unreliable until you understand how they interact with lower level systems and the balance of control comes back because you know know the circumstances in which these abstractions work in your favour.
What helped me a lot with pushing deeper down into the language innards is to have people to explain things to.
Last week, for example, one of our students asked what closures are.
Explaining that was no problem, I was also able to differentiate them from function pointers, but then she asked what in Rust the traits/interfaces Fn, FnMut and FnOnce did (which are implemented by different closures).
And yep, she struck right into a blank spot of my knowledge with that.
I have enough of an idea of them to just fill in something and let the compiler tell me off when I did it wrong.
Even when designing an API, I've worked out that you should start with an FnOnce and only progress to FnMut, then Fn and then a function pointer, as the compiler shouts at you (basically they're more specific and more restrictive for what the implementer of the closure is allowed to do).
But yeah, these rules of thumb just don't suffice for an actual explanation.
I couldn't tell you why these different traits are necessary or what the precise differences are.
So, we've been learning about them together and I have a much better understanding now.
Even in terms of closures in general (independent of the language), where I thought I had a pretty good idea, I had the epiphany that closures have two ways of providing parameters, one for the implementer (captured out of the context) and one for the caller (parameter list).
Obviously, I was aware of that on some level, as I had been using it plenty times, but I never had as clear of an idea of it before.
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I am very proficient in my primary language, C#.
Writing more context out feels like boasting, so I think I will skip that and go to a summation/conclusion directly.
Knowledge and expertise comes from more than the language. Which you hinted at. The language is only our interface. How is the language represented, how will it transform the code, how will it be run. There's a lot of depth in there - much more than there is in the language itself.
I learned a lot, through my own studies and reading, studying, projects, and experience. I'm a strong systematic thinker. It all helps me in interpreting and thinking about wide- and depth- context and concerns. I also think my strengths come at the cost of other things, at least in my particular case.
You're not alone. Most developers do not have the depth or wide knowledge. And most [consequently] struggle to or are oblivious to many concerns and opportunities, and to intuitively or quickly understand and follow such information.
Which does not necessarily mean they're not productive or useful.
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I think my job requires me to work in too many different areas. So although I can work in several languages and dev stacks, I am probably only a 2 or 3 or less out of 5 in all of them. However, network and server infrastructure, and cybersec/opsec I am probably more in the realm of a 4-4.5.
1/10 in python. I took a college course or two and enjoyed it.
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