19 September, 2016

What I Didn’t Understand as a Junior Programmer

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I remember the first time I saw a codebase over a million lines. It was at my internship, a large 10+ year old system, in multiple languages, thousands of unit tests, organized into several projects and dll’s that would take the whole night to recompile. Some of the projects had complex build processes, requiring extensive scripts, and even our source control had custom hooks preventing us from committing code that didn’t follow our style guides. It looked like it would take me a week just to read through all the documentation. My lead programmer told me it usually took people a year to understand the project in depth, but my internship was only for 3 months.

Wow, I thought. Is this what it takes to be a real programmer?

…

Alex Naraghi

Smoke and maglev spinning top

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https://i.imgur.com/3jozuyL.gif

In Defense Of A Boring, Comfortable Life

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

They call it “the easy life” for a reason.

I got my degree from a small, public college in upstate New York.

People went there, got their degrees and then went off to have quiet and sometimes boring lives. Although a degree from the State University of New York (SUNY) system is a valuable commodity outside of New York, when you’re surrounded by hundreds of thousands of graduates in your home state, it doesn’t get you very far. And for most of the people who got a degree from my school, and others like it, that was OK by them. A comfortable, unadventurous life was something they wanted. In part, that’s why they went to a state school in the first place. As SUNY Potsdam will tell anyone who asks, most of their students come from within a two- to three-hour driving distance because they want to be close to home…

Ben White (Dose)