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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

> When you liberate programming from the requirement to be professional and scalable, it becomes a different activity altogether, just as cooking at home is really nothing like cooking in a commercial kitchen.

What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.

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Some easy answers:

1. Not all articles will be relatable to everyone, and that's perfectly fine.

2. Your "what if" scenario is trivially surmountable: write some code at home, for yourself, for something you enjoy, or for someone you care about.

I don't understand how someone could read this and not only have the takeaway that you did, but come here to mention it.

Well, try it. Use an awful language you like, break conventions. If you don't like it, just scrap the project. After all, noone is waiting for you. It runs like crap and looks awful? As long as you like it, your whole userbase is fine with it

> What if you have never cooked at home but all the time in a commercial kitchen? That's the reality for most of us here so it is a bit difficult to relate to this article.

Really? I'd hazard a guess that the majority here (> 50%) have never worked at a commercial kitchen!

I'm honestly curious to understand why you think most people here must have worked at commercial kitchen and never cooked at home?

The poster is speaking through the analogy: they mean most people here have coded professionally but not at home. I'm not sure I agree with that, I think a lot of programmers have done hobby projects, even if only when they were starting out.

> they mean most people here have coded professionally but not at home

The idea that there are devs who did not do fairly extensive home coding is so alien to me! I don't personally know a single dev like that, and it would never have occurred to me that they exist.

TIL

Thanks for clearing up my confusion! That comment makes total sense now and not as baffling as it first looked.

I think you are incorrectly extrapolating to the entire community based on your personal experience. You are assuming that most of the readers at this site are working in a similar professional context that you do. You are also assuming, but all of those people who work in a professional context, do not also “cook at home.”

It’s OK if you did not relate to the article. But I certainly did!

For what it's worth, I think HN audience by nature of spending their free time learning about interesting techy things is more likely to be doing their own "home cooking".

I agree with the sentiment of the poster above if applied to the majority of professional software devs though.

I would recommend trying home cooking if only for the reason that, in a commercial kitchen, you have a role, but cooking at home means you will have/get to do everything yourself: from ingredient sourcing to dishwashing (and even front-of-house stuff like table service).

Carver Mead, in a hardware context, described the "tall, thin person" as someone comfortable at all layers: with their feet on the (rubylith!) layout and their heads in the architecture.

(I have read that in the days before email, it was customary to let the owners' kids sneakernet those manila "interdepartmental mail" envelopes as a summer job, because it brought them into contact with all the facets of an enterprise)

> Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work. — GKC

I like that you shared this post. I imagine for someone who has only done corporate programming that making a home-cooked meal (in programming terms) would be very refreshing and liberating!

It's never too late. You can start coding after work even right now. You can serve a well-cooked app to your friends and family instead of shipping a feature you don't care about to an amorphous mass of users (that you don't care about) - it's an experience worth knowing.

Fun fact: that experience will likely change you, and your commercial kitchen co-chefs will also appreciate you more afterward.

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