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Comment by jrowley | Hacker News Reader

This is great. I just started my first real full time programming job and was feeling a tad incompetent. It definitely resonates. I'm having issues with really identifying as a programmer and what expectations if any come with it. I'm starting to come to the agreement that improvement at my own pace and in my own direction is going to be vital to not burning out.

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Always keep learning in your own pace, pick up technical books, learn a weird language, get acquainted with vim or emacs, bash, awk.. it might take a handful of years but eventually you'll feel in the know, have a strong opinion about most mainstream tech and scoff at rehashes and things that won't die from 5 years ago.

> get acquainted with vim or emacs, bash, awk..

Erm, totally irrelevant to this.

> totally

tools are part of the trade, no? even if you don't use a particular one, having a decent understanding can provide a contrast to the tools you do use and perhaps improve your utilization in subtle ways.

I would disagree. Understanding different tools helps me to understand how co workers may approach a problem or teach me about why they use specific tools. VI mode in sublime may not make sense to a developer who doesn't know what vim is and why someone may choose to use it.

I prefer to invest my time in learning a new programming language, if I have to use my time to learn a new text editor (with a very steep learning curve) than it is absolutely wasted time. Modern IDEs do wonder and, honestly, the important thing in programming is not to minimise the amount of time that it takes you to write code, but to minimise the time that other people need to spend to read it.

Bash and awk are programming languages, although they're not something I'm keen on using.

> Understanding different tools helps me to understand how co workers may approach a problem or teach me about why they use specific tools.

I agree with this but that's not what he said. He quoted very specific tools needed to achieve this and that was the cause of my disagreement.

Don't think about yourself as a programmer. Think about yourself as a person having fun creating things.

It's not the amount of knowledge that makes a programmer competent. It's whether this person has the potential to be great by having the drive for constant self improvement. A great programmer is someone who pays close attention to her work and always asks whether it can be even better.

Being a beginner is the best. It's when you experience the most rapid change and improvement.

Enjoying that also helps keep you curious and wanting to learn new things. My favorite thing is getting to talk with a developer that is much better at something than me, and talking about their area of expertise. Walking and talking about a problem or sharing 45 minutes at a whiteboard can lead you to ideas that you would never find on your own.

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