What does a programmer have to barter with? | Hacker News Reader

What does a programmer have to barter with?

blog.aisleten.com

Just about everyone in the world puts up with boring, repetitive #$()# which they hate with a burning passion but can't do anything about because they don't know how to make a computer do it for them.

You don't have that problem.

I've never seen the advantages of programming put so succinctly! Also, you can say "shit" on HN.

Mark Bao: earmuffs!

I'm not quite as puritanical as I was when I was younger, but I still don't like swearing for emphasis and try to keep it to a minimum. If you had heard me speaking you might have heard one of those Bugs Bunny equivalents best transliterated as "strangled cry of frustration" or, perhaps, $(#$"). (Besides, more fun to type that way.)

If you don't like swearing for emphasis, I would suggest formatting your sentences in a way that doesn't require your readers to swear for you.

Most people will, after pausing to wonder why the shift numbers are there, just replace them with their favorite four letter word, which makes your sentence rather disjointed to read... Read, pause, substitute, continue.

English is wonderfully verbose and expressive. You can emphasize without pretend swearing.

I didn't know what was going on when I read it. I thought it was perl.

Maybe just use an inoffensive word like "garbage" instead ... but with emphasis.

I thought it was perl.

Then my cry of strangled frustration succeeded better than I could possibly have hoped for.

(I actually spent an hour trying to come up with executable perl code from them. Turns out that, jokes aside, its hard with just the characters above the numbers.)

This won't be much value for graphic designers, but I'm most often asked for help with manipulation of text files.

If you don't know about regular expressions, there are all sorts of problems that are only solvable with great amounts of tedium. There have been a few occasions where sed s/something/or other/g has saved friends of mine hours of avoidable typing, at a cost of a few minutes for me.

Also, I tend to have access to servers with more bandwidth than the average person needs, which has proved useful in the past for short-lived hosting of large files, web demos, and the like.

Don't I know it. I've saved people many hours of copy/pasting and manual indexing in several different Excel spreadsheets by having them export to CSVs, running them through a quick Perl script, and having them import again.

To a non-programmer, a computer is a tool for processing data. To a programmer, a computer is a tool for making tools. Most skilled programmers don't even realize how often they make tools for seemingly minor tasks. These tools are what we have to trade.

Agreed. Your major competitive advantage as a programmer is probably the ability to build tools.

If the problem calls for a particularly complex algorithm, or begins taking up too much time, that's when I make the tool as simple as possible and then leverage Mechanical Turk to get past the sticky bits.

My core skills are in fabrication and I spent many years doing custom work. Each job was different but the more I was able to "automate" for the customer the easier their jobs became. A well designed storage system, work station or tool could turn a tedious or awkward task into a money maker.

Regular computer users, especially in small businesses need the same non glamorous repetitive stuff you mention automated for the same reasons.

The software components are out there already, all that's needed is some "custom fabrication" to glue it all together.

I think there is a huge invisible niche between shrink wrap and enterprise. Not necessarily big money, but steady and satisfying work.

I also believe in accumulating goodwill (or debt, if you prefer :-)

If a graphic designer helps me 10 times with a 1-hour task, eventually I owe them a full day, correct? Which makes it easier for me as a programmer to contribute something meaningful to them.

The trick is to keep the right balance so that you don't get into a huge amount of debt with no way to repay it (sounds familiar?).

Also, there are many other things that you can help a graphic designer with. Good will includes introducing that person to opportunities that you are aware of, etc. Just like the poster did in his blog: that's free publicity, that may (or may not) generate some business for the graphic designer.

Call it karma. Help out if you can, don't expect an immediate barter. But in the long run, we all win.

As a programmer I've accumulated quite a bit of hardware/software knowledge which I find that people will readily take in exchange for things. Upgrading machines with new memory (RAM or HDs), faster video cards, removing malware/viruses, things of that nature. A lot of people are leery of digging into the internals of their machines.

Practically all of the Adobe apps are scriptable with "ExtendScript", which is Javascript with a few added things. There's lots of tedium that could be automated, and it wouldn't take a whole lot of time to do it.

Please also leave comments on the blog post itself. I'll update the original post with good ideas from the comments (with attribution, of course).

I understand you want people to post on your blog so your updates link to thier comment. However, if it's your blog and you are the one posting to another site it seems rude to request people post comments on your site when you can just read the comments here.

So, how about posting updates with a link to the HN comment.

PS: Granted, this could just be me.

I'll watch for both, but it's easier for me to reference the comments on the blog post itself. Some readers may never have heard of HN, so it might be slightly confusing to say "This came from so-and-so at HN"

I just thought that people here at HN would probably have some really good ideas, so I submitted it.

I get that and I liked the post. However, I have seen plenty of blog posts that used this to link to posts on other sites and it seems to work well.

You might also use the posts here as an opportunity to create a follow up blog post that contains the suggestions from here. Provided you get enough suggestions :)

setting up & hosting for free wordpress blogs for seo & promo. (with no theme design)

it takes a couple of minutes / hours and everybody is so happy

Programming visual effects. Some Websites / DVDs are sort of promotion material, which is more like a brochure and less like an "internets". But programming a showcase site for a new car or a music album is a lot of work which the sane graphic designer won't go into. But he could easily, if he had a coder ready.

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