Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whartung | Hacker News Reader

Coding is fun. When you have Stuff to Do, and momentum and a clear path to do it.

You have a ditch to dig and you just get into it.

Stack of simple web pages to knock out. Bunch of business rules to code up. Couple of routine CRUD screens.

Architecting is fun. Whiteboard, pens, couple folks in the same groove around the table. Sussing it out. Waving off the 0.01% edge case “what ifs”.

Fighting frameworks? Fighting tools? Wiring together badly behaving black boxes?

That’s not fun.

Neck deep in bad documentation. Heated discussions talking past each other on a forum. Negotiating with the dumber than rocks AI that had a flash of competence.

I like to say if I wanted to wire together badly documented black boxes, I’d have become an EE.

I’ve always said: “I love programming, but I hate computers.” All the fiddling. Software going stupid. Updates frustrating new UX. “Honey, the printer isn’t working.”

Coding is fun.

The rest of it, not so much.

>I like to say if I wanted to wire together badly documented black boxes, I’d have become an EE.

I like to say that Electrical Engineers don't believe in magic; Computer Scientists don't believe in physics!

I worked for Gerry making software for 6.002x an experimental intro EE class. I remember when Gerry came back from a weekend with a whole constraint propagator coded up!

Feynman called it the computer disease. I think that is understudied danger of computers - addictive play/fidget machines that stunt intellectual and personal growth.

What all the "not fun" stuff you're referring to has in common, is extraneous complexity.

We don't pick a framework so that we can spend hours trying to figure out why our model of what it does is different from what it actually does. We run ./configure so we can run make, not so we can spend time determining why running autoconf results in the functionality we're expecting to use getting stubbed out.

And so on. The amount of time we have to spend on things which aren't the problem can grow arbitrarily large. Manifesting a solution to the actual problem, with all of its intrinsic complexity, that is fun.

Agree! But, coding is not (all of) software development. Said another way, maybe some people like the idea of software development more than they actually like software development.

> Fighting frameworks? Fighting tools? Wiring together badly behaving black boxes?

> That’s not fun.

<popular cloud platform> makes me want to shoot myself in the face. How did we get to this point? What the fuck? Did people just need a lot of busy work to make themselves feel productive???

this is a deep cut. Remember the days when you just 'make and run' to test your programs?

Now I need pipelines, helm charts, and other 5 tools +20 mins of busy nothing work to see if a small change fixed something.

Yak Shaving: https://www.hanselman.com/blog/yak-shaving-defined-ill-get-t...

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