Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maeon3 | Hacker News Reader

I've grown the most as a programmer literally kneeling or standing behind the shoulder of programmers with 5 to 8 years more experience than I had. Those hours I spent in that position was more beneficial than hours sitting in expensive classes, hours spent debugging, hours spent reading, hours spent building new programs... combined.

The speed of great content delivery by watching someone much better than you code can be overwhelming. If the gap in experience is too large, it is like trying to show calculus to a monkey. He's not going to get it, and it will get bored. There needs to be a common ground to transmit common ideas, analogies, and new knowledge. The viewer has to put in a huge effort to keep up.

There needs to be feedback from the viewer to say: "Hey stop, what is this devil magic you are doing right there". And the presenter can stop and explain how this is muscle memory to him.

I agree. It isn't just pure programming that I have learned either. It is learning more about tools, different apps, different workflows, and new debugging tips. Also, I don't think the experience matters. Someone fresh out of school may have a new trick to teach me or a 20 year veteran has an old school trick I never new.

Yes, it is often the non-programming tricks that allow me to be a more productive programmer. Watching other programmers use a few powerful commands in vim, plus a cool flag for grep I didn't know about, plus how to efficiently organize things in directories to quickly find things, etc. All these little tricks I learned from a couple programmers my first year probably doubled my productivity as a programmer.

So basically, watching people solve problems?

I think all you need are good channel descriptions, that way a novice who knows a little Python can choose to watch a stream of someone with 3-4 years Python experience rather than someone with 20 years of C experience doing linux kernel hacking.

Maybe it would be an idea to add a comment system to the viewer component. So at a given time in the cast you could put in a question, asking what the heck was the point of this or that, and someone else could answer you (perhaps the person originally submitting the cast, but presumably other people might answer as well),

It is really disruptive having to explain something from "muscle memory" in logical terms. That said, a good programmer should always be able to explain what they are doing to another capable peer.

Years of experience as a quality gauge is an interesting choice. Just from anecdotal experience or simplification?

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