Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

For those who want a good free programmer education and are willing to put in some work to get it: look at source code, not blogs, and work on projects with experienced programmers, don't just read what they write.

There's a natural alignment of incentives when you're working on the same codebase as someone who actually knows what they're doing. Any mistake you make, they have to fix, and so they have good reasons to see you get up to speed as quickly as possible.

Another good heuristic for online forums and comments: the shorter the comment, the greater the chance that the person actually knows what they're talking about. Experienced people often might throw out a quick correction because it costs them nothing, but have no desire to get into a big debate because their time is more valuable than that.

> look at source code

A smart high-school student who enjoys a challenge comes up to you and asks which projects to look at, and (if you say more than one) which one to start with. What do you say?

Best option is actually to get a job where you'll be working with other senior programmers and then understand your company's source code. That's how I did it - my first job had Ken Arnold as the CTO, then when I got to Google I'd lurk on Jeff Dean or Rob Pike's code reviews (everything is public internally at Google, you can see what everyone's working on). The big advantage of this is that you understand the business context behind the code; it's really hard to understand code in isolation without understanding the purpose behind the code and the goals for which it was written. A secondary advantage is that you've got ready-made mentors.

If you can't get a job and need to go the open-source route, then Rust, Chromium, V8, Django, and the Linux Kernel are all good options. Again, the guiding principle is to pick software where you're familiar with the outside, so you have context when you go look at the inside. Reading software in isolation is hard, so you're often best off volunteering to fix a couple low-priority bugs on the bug queue, and then diving in to start with them. Existing volunteers will often point you to the right spot in the code to get started if you're doing productive work for them.

Nice name-dropping in the first paragraph.

My first jobs involved maintenance programming with some huge applications and truly awful source code.

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