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YACOSET
Personal blog · yacoset.com/Homeprogrammingcareer
YACOSET is a personal blog at yacoset.com about programming and career. Since 2010, 15 different Hacker News readers have linked it 24 times, most often “Signs that you are a bad programmer”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Essays on programming skill and career, mainly 'Signs that you are a bad programmer' with remedies and a companion 'good programmer' piece, plus a post on scripting literacy and the future of IT.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Signs that you are a bad programmer8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-10-19
- Signs That You're a Good Programmer5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-06-01
- Clever ideas that failed (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-05-04
What Hacker News says?
I wrote this years ago to get it out of my system, and after Infogami went to the big web host in the sky I ported it and my other nonsense to Google Sites. The slightly updated version of the same article is now here: http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programm...
Comment linking /Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programmer
on “Signs that you are a bad programmer”Submitted Signs that you are a bad programmer as a story · 450 points
HN discussionFrom the follow-up[0]: ""Bad programmer" is also considered inflammatory by some who think I'm speaking down to them. Not so; it was personal catharsis from an author who exhibited many of those problems himself. And what I think made the article popular was the "remedies"--I didn't want someone to get depressed when they recognized themselves, I wanted to be constructive." Which I think is fair enough. Besides whic…
Comment linking /Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-programmer
on “Signs that you're a bad programmer (2012)”Submitted Signs that you're a bad programmer (2012) as a story · 289 points
HN discussionThis pair of articles are surprisingly comprehensive, nuanced, and worthwhile: http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programm... http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-program...
Comment linking /Home/signs-that-you-re-a-good-programmer
on “Ask HN: What non-technical skills make a senior dev and how to develop them?”Submitted Clever ideas that failed (2010) as a story · 159 points
HN discussion"I’m suddenly self-conscious about the prettiness of my code — it doesn’t matter if I can solve the problem, since I’m also competing against candidates who can solve the problem, so the real competition is probably about how elegant and idiomatic our code is." This is an incorrect assumption, at least when I interview people. A live coding interview has (almost) nothing to do with the "quality" of your code, and do…
Comment linking /Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programmer
on “Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview”Submitted Signs That You're a Good Programmer as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI find it exciting that there are others who have also realized that programming skills are going to be as necessary to success today as reading and writing have been for the past few centuries. I had the same epiphany last year and wrote about it along with what I thought it would lead to: http://www.yacoset.com/Home/the-future-of-it Yes, I'm boasting that "I thought of it first", but I have a feeling that maybe I…
Comment linking /Home/the-future-of-it
on “Matt Mullenweg: Scripting is the new literacy”Submitted Signs that you're a good programmer as a story · 36 points
HN discussionthe "signs of a bad programmer" post [0] was a response of the experiences of this post. [0] http://www.yacoset.com/Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programm...
Comment linking /Home/signs-that-you-re-a-bad-programmer
on “Three years of practical software engineering at Lifelock (2012)”Submitted Signs that you're a good programmer as a story · 16 points
HN discussionSubmitted Signs that you're a bad programmer as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Andromeda Strain is the greatest Debugging tutorial as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Signs that you're a good programmer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Signs that you're a bad programmer as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Clever ideas that failed as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Habits I'm Glad I Have, Habits I Wish I Had as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted The future of IT as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Signs that you're a bad programmer as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Basic Literacy (yet another response to Atwood) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Every line of code is a user interface as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Become the customer, or: why projects fail as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
