alt Hacker NewsAuthor here. Off the top of my head:
- Software is simpler than you think when you boil it down. There's a massive incentive to over-sell the complexity of the problem a solution is trying to solve, to pull in users. This is true both for proprietary products and, to a lesser degree, FOSS. You can probably replace most of the tools you use day-to-day in a weekend or two - provided you keep practising the art of just building stuff. I'm not saying that you should, but it's worth keeping in the back of your head if a tool is driving you mad.
- You can achieve 80% of the functionality with 20% of the work required to build an off-the-shelf solution. In a surprising number of cases, you can do the same with 20% of the integration cost of an off-the-shelf solution. A lot of software is - to put it quite bluntly - shit (I include a lot of my own libraries in this list!). There are probably only a few hundred really valuable reusable software components out there.
- Aggressively chase simplicity and avoid modularity if you want to actually achieve anything. The absolute best way to never get anything useful out of a project is to start off by splitting it into a dozen components/crates/repositories. You will waste 75% of your time babysitting the interfaces between the components rather than making the thing work.
- Delete code, often. If you look at the repo activity (https://git.jsbarretto.com/zesterer/zte/activity/code-freque...) you'll see that I'm deleting code almost as much as I'm adding it, especially now that I've got the core nailed down. This is not wasted effort: your first whack at solving a problem is usually filled with blunders so favour throwaway code that's small enough to keep in your head when the time comes to bin it and make it better.
- It is absolutely critical that you understand the fundamental mode of operation of the code you've already written if you want to maintain development velocity. As Peter Naur said, programming is theory-building and the most important aspect of a program is the ineffable model of it you hold in your head. Every other effort must be in deference to maintaining the mental model.
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Couldn't agree more with this. Particularly re simplicity and deleting depricatsd code.
Just wanted to thank you for sharing thoughts here and on your website. The article about making your own text editor, the one about how "toy software" is a joy, another about language models, and this comment.. I've been programming since I was a child, and have gone through ups and downs in the industry as well as personally, how I relate to computing - in the context of that experience, I've appreciated your insight. I often find myself nodding in agreement and glad to see the ideas articulated well.
If notation is a tool of thought, and programming is theory-building, the way you're communicating your experience in words is a kind of knowledge transfer to an audience of indefinite scale, a public service that contributes to collective understanding.