Top all-time · #1537
Typical Programmer
Personal blog · typicalprogrammer.com · on HN as gregjorprogrammingcareer
Typical Programmer is a personal blog at typicalprogrammer.com about programming and career. Since 2007, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 118 times, most often “The joys of maintenance programming (2011)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Most-linked posts?
- The joys of maintenance programming (2011)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2017-04-22
- Linus Torvalds goes off on Linux and Git (2012)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2015-01-06
- Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming (2007)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-29
- Show HN: isOdd (and isEven) as a Web Service3 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-01-16
- Why don’t software development methodologies work?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-02-10
- Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-11-03
- What does code readability mean?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-01-08
- Why don’t software development methodologies work? (2014)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-21
- /how-to-start-freelancing-and-get-clients2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-01-09
- How to work with freelance software developers2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-05-09
What Hacker News says?
This is sadly common in a community keen on logic, evidence, and avoiding fallacies in thinking. Worse than puzzles are pointless faux psychological screening questions like "Tell me about something painful that has happened to you and how you dealt with it." I would (and have) asked if the interviewer or organization has any evidence to show that interview puzzle performance (or shit like Myers-Brigg) predicts job…
Comment linking /thirteen-patterns-of-programmer-interviews/
on “Dear Startups: stop asking me math puzzles to figure out if I can code”Submitted Why don’t software development methodologies work? as a story · 289 points
HN discussionInteresting read for those who don't understand our fancy for legacy code: http://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-program...
Comment linking /the-joys-of-maintenance-programming
on “How to Improve a Legacy Codebase”Submitted Why don’t software development methodologies work? (2014) as a story · 204 points
HN discussionI've been mentoring a couple of junior programmers for a couple of years and I have seen the kind of junk tutorials and online misinformation they find. Some of it is useful because it shows so many bad ideas and implementations -- like studying a plane crash to find out what went wrong. I wrote an article about this back in 2007, regarding Javascript examples in an O'Reilly book -- a source I used to recommend beca…
Comment linking /learning-by-example-how-bad-code-propagates
on “Google results for PHP tutorials contain SQL injection vulnerabilities”Submitted Working on an iPad Pro as my main computer as a story · 152 points
HN discussionIt is not a quote by Linus but part of a satirical piece, see: http://typicalprogrammer.com/linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linu...
Comment linking /linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linux-and-git/
on “Gitless: a version control system”Submitted What does code readability mean? as a story · 148 points
HN discussionI could be wrong, but I think the article that the Torvalds quote came from was purely satirical [1]. If you look at the tags it says it was posted under satire. Got me at first too! [1]: http://typicalprogrammer.com/linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linu...
Comment linking /linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linux-and-git/
on “Gitless: a version control system”Submitted The joys of maintenance programming as a story · 141 points
HN discussionSome more quotes taken from http://typicalprogrammer.com/what-does-code-readability-mean that you might find interesting. Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. – Martin Fowler Just because people tell you it can’t be done, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it can’t be done. It just means that they can’t do it. – Anders Hejlsberg The true test…
Comment linking /what-does-code-readability-mean
on “Maybe You Don't Need Kubernetes”Submitted What does code readability mean? (2018) as a story · 97 points
HN discussionThanks for the endorsement, Greg! Makes me incredibly happy to hear that you've had a positive experience with 10x. Re: the praise for Michael Solomon, for the record, I (the technical partner at 10x) was originally very wary about starting this company with non-technical cofounders... but, at this point, the value they add to our clients and to our business is absolutely undeniable. Michael and Rishon are world-cla…
Comment linking /
on “The Programmer's Price: Want to hire a coding superstar? Call the agent”Submitted How I work as a digital nomad as a story · 87 points
HN discussionWhat if I'd done that 20 times around my code-base and then later I discover there's an off-by-one error in the original code that's maybe been inherited into all 20 copies? If I could actually reuse code properly I'd only have to fix it once. Without effective code reuse, I have to hunt down the copies, each of which may have slight modifications to make them better fit their use case (and might be hard to grep for…
Comment linking /abject-oriented/
on “Proposal: Go should have generics”Submitted Sorry, Digital Ad Exec, I Probably Don’t Want To Work For You as a story · 86 points
HN discussionAnd that's exactly why I am not convinced that Go is as maintainable as often claimed. 30 seconds for you, but how many hours for the poor souls who will come after you and ask: should I change this copy too or is it a separate case? It reminds me of this: http://typicalprogrammer.com/abject-oriented/
Comment linking /abject-oriented/
on “Proposal: Go should have generics”Submitted What does code readability mean? (2018) as a story · 58 points
HN discussion" Surprisingly, left to themselves programmers don’t revert to cowboy coding—they adopt or create methodologies stricter and more filled with ritual than anything I experienced in 1980. In fact programmers today can be much more rigid and religious about their methodologies than they imagine a 1970s-era COBOL shop was. I now routinely get involved with projects developed by one or two people burdened with so much pr…
Comment linking /why-dont-software-development-methodologies-work/
on “Why don’t software development methodologies work?”Submitted Linus Torvalds goes off on Linux and Git as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI see a few good lessons here: 1. You can learn a lot about your own code and your tools by digging in and debugging and experimenting. 2. As macspoofing argues, having a correct mental model of your application, and your tools, is what separates professional programmers from amateurs and beginners. You don't need to do much math or understand Fermi estimates to figure out that removing 30 bytes of excess key name f…
Comment linking /?p=14
on “From 1.5 GB to 50 MB: The Story of my Redis Database”Submitted Why Programmers Don't Like Relational Databases as a story · 43 points
HN discussionI wasn't able to figure out how to post a comment/reply on Blogger, sorry. Thanks for pointing me to your article from the HN flame war about MongoDB. If only there were more useful articles like this and less flaming. You wrote "...in MySQL, the application is king and the db a humble servant." That is exactly my experience, and it leads not only to terrible databases but to piles of awful code written around terri…
Comment linking /?p=101
on “Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB”Submitted Introduction to Abject-Oriented Programming as a story · 29 points
HN discussionYou were fortunate to recognize that MongoDB was the wrong tool for your job, and lucky to be able to move to Postgres instead of continuing to throw your time and effort away. I see the ad hominem "you're an ignorant idiot" attacks already started, along with advice like using regexes to do case-insensitive searches. Watching the NoSQL "movement" encounter the problems RDBMSs fixed 20 years ago and then hand-wave a…
Comment linking /?p=14
on “Why I Migrated Away From MongoDB”Submitted Blog comment correcting startup gets $25m funding as a story · 28 points
HN discussionI went from f/t to contracting/freelancing almost 15 years ago. I wrote a long-ish article about getting started as a freelancer: https://typicalprogrammer.com/how-to-start-freelancing-and-g... (Free, no ads or affiliate links.) I think the key is to identify a niche (or a few) that gets you out of the low-bid commodity Upwork/Fiverr wading pool — competition is always more dense at the low end. A professional netwo…
Comment linking /how-to-start-freelancing-and-get-clients
on “Ask HN: How do you start contracting?”Submitted Doing it wrong: getters and setters as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI was really surprised that Git "won" because I thought that Mercurial's friendlier CLI and being written in Python would give it an advantage. I think I underestimated how good it makes people feel to understand something incredibly complicated. I guess immutable history was a turn off for many people as well. This fake interview is pretty funny: "Linus: Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks…
Comment linking /linus-torvalds-goes-off-on-linux-and-git/
on “Mercurial: Onward and upward”Submitted Relational Database Experts Jump The MapReduce Shark as a story · 22 points
HN discussion
