The developer who was there when I started my last job believed that libraries should be avoided at all costs. He wrote a CSV reader from scratch in python. It didn’t work in many edge cases. He didn’t like it when I pointed that out. Nor when I showed him that his “better way” in another case was more than 10x slower using a profiler… At least he was using git, but the git history was full of long series of identical commit messages unrelated to code changes, because PyCharm has an option to reuse the previous commit message on a new commit…
He eventually quit and I spent 3 years refactoring his garbage before we finally had a tech team who could take over (I’m a scientist, with self taught coding skills). Pretty sure even after we had a tech team of 7 if was still a better coder than most, purely because I was interested in how coding works, and trying to understand underlying concepts.
This is what I try to tell everybody who wants to do the whole “I can’t understand how to use computers” schtick, and it’s still often too much to handle.
Yeah, it seems that so many people are that way about so many things. And at some point I honestly thing it is bad for you.
Sometimes learning to do the thing and then doing it yourself is a FAR better experience for your well being even if you get worse results in twice the time and at double the cost versus paying somebody to do it for you.
I am convinced that impostor syndrome is just the other end of the spectrum from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that having impostor syndrome means you’re an expert, but that you have the curiosity to look under the surface and get a glimpse of the long path ahead of you. You don’t just assume you “got this” because one piece of many clicked into place.
I guess my strong impostor syndrome has mellowed over these past 5 or so years while I have been working on myself (as in mental health, not job skills, lol). Some of it is confidence gained by knowing better who I am and what I want out of life, accompanied by elimination of a lot of “I should be learning this / doing that / building my career XYZ” thoughts. And part of it is leaning into what makes me different from others at work versus the others, using that stuff as strengths rather than seeing them as deficiencies where I don’t match up.
I did it once to pull out data from a spreadsheet into a database. Specifically, I needed "${DataType}${Month}" for each month for 3 different datatypes
Iirc, i used an sql pivot (or unpivot) in that query too
Usually, it’s situations like this where you’re parsing data from strings, and you need some glue code to interface between the input data, and the date library you’re using to actually resolve the datetime
Really curious in what scenarios people would be writing enums with months and weekdays.
Because short of developing yet another library to handle date and time, everything else is likely a disaster waiting to happen…
Wrapping a blackbox/legacy system would be a good reason.
Declare the old API in your new language, warts’n’all.
A lot of developers are not passionate, or not curious, or don’t know that libraries exist, or all at once (aka stupid). I’ve seen this everywhere.
The developer who was there when I started my last job believed that libraries should be avoided at all costs. He wrote a CSV reader from scratch in python. It didn’t work in many edge cases. He didn’t like it when I pointed that out. Nor when I showed him that his “better way” in another case was more than 10x slower using a profiler… At least he was using git, but the git history was full of long series of identical commit messages unrelated to code changes, because PyCharm has an option to reuse the previous commit message on a new commit…
He eventually quit and I spent 3 years refactoring his garbage before we finally had a tech team who could take over (I’m a scientist, with self taught coding skills). Pretty sure even after we had a tech team of 7 if was still a better coder than most, purely because I was interested in how coding works, and trying to understand underlying concepts.
Ah, yes. The secret to being better than most people at at most things. Curiosity and giving a shit.
This is what I try to tell everybody who wants to do the whole “I can’t understand how to use computers” schtick, and it’s still often too much to handle.
Yeah, it seems that so many people are that way about so many things. And at some point I honestly thing it is bad for you.
Sometimes learning to do the thing and then doing it yourself is a FAR better experience for your well being even if you get worse results in twice the time and at double the cost versus paying somebody to do it for you.
My impostor syndrome is saying that I suck at everything, I just got curiosity to get over some of it…
I am convinced that impostor syndrome is just the other end of the spectrum from the Dunning-Kruger effect.
That doesn’t necessarily mean that having impostor syndrome means you’re an expert, but that you have the curiosity to look under the surface and get a glimpse of the long path ahead of you. You don’t just assume you “got this” because one piece of many clicked into place.
I guess my strong impostor syndrome has mellowed over these past 5 or so years while I have been working on myself (as in mental health, not job skills, lol). Some of it is confidence gained by knowing better who I am and what I want out of life, accompanied by elimination of a lot of “I should be learning this / doing that / building my career XYZ” thoughts. And part of it is leaning into what makes me different from others at work versus the others, using that stuff as strengths rather than seeing them as deficiencies where I don’t match up.
That’s the ticket to be a good software programmer, well done! 😁
It will when you realize the people in your room are mostly talking but actually have no clue.
I did it once to pull out data from a spreadsheet into a database. Specifically, I needed
"${DataType}${Month}"for each month for 3 different datatypesIirc, i used an sql pivot (or unpivot) in that query too
Usually, it’s situations like this where you’re parsing data from strings, and you need some glue code to interface between the input data, and the date library you’re using to actually resolve the datetime