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   Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Thursday, 13-Nov-2025 18:49:47 JST Niki Tonsky

   “You are not worse than the kernel hacker, the compiler engineer, or the game engine programmer. You, too, can build whatever you want to build. All software is just software. It's time we treated it that way.”

   https://jimmyhmiller.com/overly-humble-programmer

   • Embed this notice
     Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 00:19:31 JST Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     • Josh Simmons

     @dotstdy @nikitonsky this is the essence of all of those "how it started / how it's going" memes.

     But sure, wth. When you're learning, "how hard could it be" is a perfectly good question.

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 00:19:31 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas
     • Josh Simmons

     @hyc @dotstdy

     > When you're learning, "how hard could it be" is a perfectly good question

     Not just when learning. In fact, with more experience this question becomes even more useful.

     I’ve done a lot of projects because I thought they must be easy but everybody kept saying they were hard and I’ll understand once the real use (production) comes.

     Sometimes it did, but most often it didn’t. My simple implementation just kept doing what it was supposed to do

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     Josh Simmons (dotstdy@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 00:19:32 JST Josh Simmons

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas

     @hyc @nikitonsky I would perhaps put this differently, that people often have wildly inaccurate estimations of complexity. In both directions (for different cohorts). So it's silly to suggest you'd just bang out a quick caching system and have it be robust in production, at least without a lot of work. But it's also silly to suggest that X person is incapable of it. If they take the problem seriously they're going to be just as capable as anybody else, more or less.

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     Josh Simmons (dotstdy@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 00:19:32 JST Josh Simmons

     in reply to

     • Howard Chu @ Symas

     @hyc @nikitonsky if people never step outside their comfort level they never find out whether something actually is hard or not, and they have to rely on the equally uninformed heresay that floats around.

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     Howard Chu @ Symas (hyc@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 00:19:33 JST Howard Chu @ Symas

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky maybe. The majority of code I've seen shows that not everybody is capable of writing a properly functioning cache, and most programmers shouldn't bother with it.

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     Chris Martin (chris__martin@functional.cafe)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 03:47:24 JST Chris Martin

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky @jimmyhmiller Some people talk about being "afraid to learn," this is phrased in a somewhat kinder way as humility, it all misses that everything you put time into is time away from something else and is not just a binary "do I want to learn rust or not" isolated decision

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     Niki Tonsky (nikitonsky@mastodon.online)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 03:47:24 JST Niki Tonsky

     in reply to

     • Chris Martin

     @chris__martin @jimmyhmiller I definitely felt that feeling from the article, that some people just don’t believe they can write libraries. That it’s something magical that very special people do. It’s not even about being afraid to learn, it’s just believing world is more complicated or guarded than it is

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     Chris Martin (chris__martin@functional.cafe)'s status on Friday, 14-Nov-2025 03:47:25 JST Chris Martin

     in reply to

     @nikitonsky @jimmyhmiller The difficulty is only deciding how to spend your sparse non-humble moments of discretionary time. Be not humble about how much you can grow in the garden? Fix the plumbing yourself? Or write another text editor?