Posting this as it deeply resonates with me
Yeah. It was pretty awful early in my career. The good news is that “The person with an opinion has no power over the person with an experience.”
As I’ve built up years of my own work experiences, I don’t spend as much energy on each new idea I encounter.
Now I’m just proud that I still, once in awhile, significantly change the way I work, thanks to new information.
But, since what my team is doing works well already, I have to encounter the same advice from several trusted sources. And then we put it through a test sprint with a thoughtful team retrospective, after.
It’s possible to find a happy balance, but it takes experience to get there.
Edit: So to answer the obvious question - what advice stuck with me?
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Host team retrospectives. The rest of Agile is optional. Effective retrospectives are mandatory, because they’re what tunes everything else correctly for my team and my organization.
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Cherish plain text under version control. I’ve slept soundly many nights when others were up and working late, thanks to the simplicity and clarity of the process of reviewing what changed in plain text files. Any time a tool supports being setup with plain text files under version control, I advocate for that option.
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Pick one thing that matters for today. It helps me focus, and forces me to really decide what matters, today. It helps me say “no” to requests that need to wait. And it helps me choose to give myself a break after I get that one thing done. One important thing per day adds up to awestriking levels of annual productivity, given reasonable opportunities.
When I was learning to program in the 1990s, at university, it was easy to get good advice and learning from the printed word: both in books and on websites. I think if I had to start learning all over again, and not be in a good school, it would be very hard for me to do as well.
Today there is too much advice, too many influencers who recently learned whatever they are peddling, too much AI, too many fields of tech.
I think the best way to learn now is how many of us learned decades earlier; use a list of books that are vetted by many ( can find lists here and there, saw one in GitHub last year). And while reading the books read the documentation even if they are gaps in one’s knowledge and the docs are badly written.
I don’t think one needs recent books for many concepts and basics. The wheel has been reinvented many times in the hundreds of tech stacks in use today. And the same concepts will be easy enough to learn in newer docs once a technology and programming set of tools is invested into by the learner.
As for new software engineering ideas and architecture concepts: usually these are reiterated from earlier ideas and often marketed for profit. So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.
I find that the .NET/C# documentation has great guidance for old and new concepts. There’s reference docs with remarks, there’s guidance and best practice recommendations, and there’s examples and guided work-alongs.
Personally I’ve never done the examples or video or text follow-alongs. But I greatly value the concept guidance that goes beyond mere reference docs with remarks.
While it’s somewhat specific to the .NET/C# ecosystem, I imagine it’s valuable beyond it, and maybe a good example of how a big and significant enough project can provide more relevant and condensed information than “random tech blogs and websites” or similar.
I spent a lot of time using msdn Microsoft docs for windows and activex c++ back in the day. Faintly envious there are videos in the c# docs.
I changed tech stacks, but comments and examples are awesome to use inside docs. Usually in the php, it’s the comments in the docs that are the best help, and example code and work around can be found there.
But most php depends on the tens of thousands of projects and libraries made others: so the docs one needs is scattered in the dependencies. Some who have good docs (laravel) and some that have no docs , in which case a debugger is best way to learn.
So older architecture books, refined by several editions, are still best.
Yeah. It’s hard to do better than the classicsl books. The language structures have changed, but the core principles endure.
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This puts to words something I was recently thinking about pretty well, especially the part about being an “advice seeker” and not really being able to solve stuff on your own, which is something I’ve always attributed to just being a field where you are driven to, especially in school, to have The Correct Solution, and that one always exists.
I mostly struggled with this when I tried getting into art, especially music or drawing. Suddenly, there’s no algorothm or The Solution, and you have to figure out something based only on your creativity and judgement, and there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”, which for someone being used to there mostly being one, was something I never managed to get over to this day, because it simply stresses me to the point of creative paralysis.
Thankfully, due to enshitiffication of most of the services I was following, which basically forced me to drop them due to invasive privacy rules, AI integration, or not working in privacy focused browsers or over a VPN, it’s getting better. I’m kind of looking forward to OpenAI, Google and Meta finally killing most of the internet, so I can let go when 90% of content is AI generated, 60% of websites wont work without chrome, and the rest is just porn.
there’s no-one who will tell you “this is the correct answer”,
That’s a great point. The metric that really matters is “good enough for today”, which can be very subjective.
Oh man, you’re so right in highlighting how this problem manifests even in art. In a way, hobby related stuff is even harder because there’s a weird pressure arising from a sense that you’re not allowed to enjoy things that you’re not good at. And like, how are you meant to get better at a thing if it doesn’t feel permissible to be mediocre at it for a while? What if you don’t want to get better at a thing, what if someone is happy to just have fun with a hobby and doesn’t care if they are consistently mediocre at it, because they’re doing it for themselves.
And it doesn’t get better if you are good at the thing. Suddenly you’ve got people saying “wow, you’re so good at that, you should sell them”, and that’s then even more pressure because it reinforces the constant feeling that not only must one strive for the “correct answer” in all things, but that progress towards this answer involves selling the products of one’s labour because that’s how we try to translate intangibles into measurable numbers. But the logic falls apart because excellent leather craftsmanship, for example, isn’t at all related to one’s ability to be running a business, and every time I have monetised a hobby, it kills the joy of the craft. Similarly, I have a friend who is an artist who used to be earning money from art, but they got sick of doing pet portraiture and got an office job so they could regain art as a hobby. Things that sell well != Things that are good (and that’s even before we consider the Intrinsic value in dabbling in hobbies and creativity for fun’s sake)
Same man, getting distracted is so easy these days. Lemmy does feel better than Reddit so that is a plus, but man, times wasted scrolling endlessly consuming, not creating is like eating food that’s not good for you. Yeah it satisfies cravings but rarely leaves you satisfied for long.
Thanks for posting, OP. I have replied to a few people’s comments in this thread, and I’m really appreciating you sharing this post which has led to such thought-provoking discussion.
