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ooooakon Ask HN: What are the reasons behind your success as a self-taught programmer?

i would say "3. Working in real projects at industry" when i was 19 i had the opportunity to build real world systems. Durning that year i delivered a full stack e-commerce using MVC pattern for a client. Someone who is just starting its a lots of hard work to deliver a MVC full stack app and i learned a great deal.

Later i joined a USA based startup really large project. This is where i learned how to manage large SaaS apps and how to manage complexity.

Since then i have been only building SaaS products and i love it. Currently i am leading the development of microservices based system based on GraphQL and everything is running k8. i have worked on every part of that system.

I think starting early helped me a lot :)

ooooakon Ask HN: Does an equivalent of Clojure exist for .NET?

ooooakon Ask HN: People working remotely, how do you plan your workday?

I keep a todo list in a text file and it worked really well. been doing it for last 4 years.

ooooakon Ask HN: People working remotely, how do you plan your workday?

I mostly have a list of todos in simple text file.

ooooakon Ask HN: What is your learning plan for 2020?

1. learn .net core

2. doing youtube

3. push MVP into production

ooooakon Ask HN: How do I escape webdev?

> I basically want to get as far away from Node and React and CSS as possible. What's a good path out?

.net core or spring boot?

ooooakon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (March 2020)

  Location: Punjab, India
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies: PHP, Laravel, Node, Express, React, Go, Clojure
  Résumé/CV: ooooak.github.io/cv
  Email: akshay.deep0@gmail.com

ooooakon Clojure: A Lisp that wants to spread

1. In India, there are only ~100 jobs for a Clojure developer. That includes people just throwing in Clojure just to hire Java/Scala developer.

2. The learning curve for the Clojure. Clojure is simple but it's not easy by any means.

3. JVM interop if you are not a java developer it adds in more learning time. Most of the Clojure libraries use java heavily. It's a good thing but it adds in an extra layer of learning java's ecosystem.

4. Error messages. Even after years of Clojure. I still find it hard.

5. Documentation. Most of the packages I use don't have dedicated websites or good documentation.

Even after all the issues. It's still worth the investment. I started working on a crawler for a freelance gig. we first built it using Golang. But due to its complexity and lots of bugs due to mutation. We ported it to Clojure and we are not looking back.

ooooakon Ask HN: How to get good at designing big and complex applications?

> How to get good at designing big and complex applications?

Write small and simple programs.

ooooakon Ask HN: How do I stay motivated to learn?

> I just remind myself that this world has 7.5 billion people on it, and as a programmer I have a better income than the VAST majority of them.

That's just not true.

ooooakon Ask HN: Which are the best resources to learn Compiler Design

> Writing an Interpreter in Go https://amzn.to/2PA5LEh

ooooakon A Simplified Jira Clone Built with React/Babel and Node/TypeScript

it's already way better than Jira.

ooooakon Ask HN: What change in your programming technique has been most transformative?

FP, REPL Driven Development and generative testing.

In short, I have been doing Clojure since last year.

ooooakon Ask HN: What are your best shell scripts that you use?

> cat `find * -type f | grep .php` | wc -l

I have a project that is going on since 2015. So ran the above command to see how much code we have. I was expecting our models to be really large turns out we have ~(404 * 3) rest endpoints. the scariest thing was Vendor dir.

LOC per dir

Models: 15053

HTTP Endpoints: 28877

migrations: 49757

Laravel: 81728 (Framework)

Vendor: 1158299 (third party php code)

Total: 1797417

ooooakon Rob Pike – Simplicity Is Complicated (2015)

> Simple Made Easy by Rich Hickey

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

ooooakon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (December 2019)

Location: India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: LAMP, Laravel, Node, Express, React/Nextjs

Résumé/CV: https://ooooak.github.io/cv

Email:akshay.deep0@gmail.com

ooooakon Ask HN: Who are your programming rockstars, and why?

Agree, Clojure has the most influence on me. There are lots of things to learn from Clojure and I don't see anyone taking lessons from Clojure people. it seems like everything is just one large MVC after rails. We are not ready to move on.

ooooakon Ask HN: For a startup, when should I begin writing tests?

> I'm also afraid of digging an inescapable hole of untestable spaghetti code and tech debt.

if you are worried about tech debt you should watch "The art of destroying software". It will be hard to understand at first.

Here is TL;DR. Writing small services that will take only one week of work to rewrite. That way you can burn your services and recreate when you truly understand your domain.

Recently I worked on a REST API using go. I think the go package system has good support for writing small and independent packages. Just make sure your microservices are micro.

You can do the same for your React Codebase.

ooooakon Ask HN: What's your definition of a technical debt?

> technical debt

https://vimeo.com/108441214

ooooakon Ask HN: What is the best programming language and eco system for backend?

I am not sold on scala. i would rather use clojure.

ooooakon Ask HN: What is the best programming language and eco system for backend?

I feel your pain, I managed a node app in production for 2+ years. That made me realize PHP is not that bad. Now I see this trend where people just throw in Typescript. Why not just use a statically typed language?

if you write lots of rest API you should use Go and thank me later.

ooooakon 20K Workers Will Be Jobless in Indian IT Sector, Thanks to Infosys and Cognizant

It's storytime

S1. I met a guy who was really passionate about blockchain and python. At some point, he joined a startup. They were using react-native. Within 2 months he left the job. They treated him really poorly, and no one was there to help him. Now he is preparing for gov jobs.

s2. Another young gun, who works in TCS it's been 6 months since he is last wrote a single line of code. At some point, they will throw a project at him and assume he is a top java hacker. That will solve all kinds of crazy problems.

ooooakon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (November 2019)

Location: India (state punjab)

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: MySQL, PHP/Laravel, Javascript/Node/express/react, Go/gin/gorm, python, rust, and Clojure (Yes, I like learning languages next will be erlang/elixir with phoenix)

Résumé/CV: https://ooooak.github.io/cv

Email: akshay.deep0@gmail.com

-----

I am a Full-stack developer with 8 years of experience. I have worked remotely all my life. I built the fixdrepair.com from scratch using boring php/laravel and that served us really well. looking for interesting work not just crud app.

ooooakon Ask HN: What programming language you use the most at work?

Clojure

ooooakon Ask HN: How has learning a new language helped you in your career?

> How has learning a new language helped you in your career?

I have a success story, I would not say it helped me in my career. but it made me more confident as a developer.

I was a full-stack PHP developer. In my free time, I always learn new languages (python, ruby, go, rust, OCaml, Clojure, and some Haskell). even now I kinda enjoy learning new stacks. its just fun for me.

For one of our projects (it's back 3 or 4 years ago), we used node. To that point, I never really looked deep into it as I was always busy with go and rust. turns out I was really productive from day one. while others had to do some soul searching.

In short, it made me a better developer and more confident.

ooooakon Ask HN: How to learn new technical skills as a freelancer?

I had the same mindset but it turns out its not the right one for me. People don't really care about how many languages you know. They want their business problems to be fixed. if you are interested in technology x first try it your self. see if it something you actually wanna use it. then market your self around it.

jumping to a new stack could also mean you will be unproductive for years and you will face problems that you never have seen before. Surely all new technologies sound fun but at the end of the day, there are no silver bullets. on top, it takes years to be an expert at any stack.

I started with PHP and then moved to the node. that made me realize how good PHP is. I have been looking for an alternative on the backend. Go, Clojure and elixir sound about right. turns out they all have their issues too. It's better to stick to your guns and only move when the current stack is not fixing the problems you have created for your self.

ooooakon Ask HN: What are you working on this week?

I have two things in mind,

1. Headless eCommerce in go

2. A Clojure like language for PHP in Clojure (will be very simple)

After looking at "Making the Tokio scheduler 10x faster" I was thinking how hard it's gonna be to create a Clojure for rust. That will leverage rust's ecosystem. That means you get max performance of rust and get to use it with a nicer language.

ooooakon Ask HN: How do you build applications that require zero maintenance?

not true, I have lots of experience in PHP and if I write code in go sure it will have more bugs than my PHP implementation. how familiar are you with your current stack matters a lot. Also, That does not mean you should use a runtime where 100 things can go wrong (talking about node).

if the goal is to maintain an application and catch issues at compile time. go with a better type system Haskell/Ocaml/Rust.

Another option would be to use generative testing where you have tight control over what gets in, for example, Clojure/Spec.

ooooakon Ask HN: How do you build applications that require zero maintenance?

have a business model that never changes. use the ecosystem that you are most familiar with and have fewer surprises.

ooooakon Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (October 2019)

Location: Punjab, India

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: PHP/Laravel, Node/Express/sequelize, React/Nextjs

Résumé/CV:https://ooooak.github.io/cv

Email:akshay.deep0@gmail.com

I am a full stack developer (Some Devops) focused on REST API, Database Design and Backend. I am also productive in Go, Rust, and Clojure. I would love to switch into Elixir/Phoenix or erlang.