Re:The Importance of Humility in Software Development (2020)
by TeMPOraL on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @02:56AM
(#27127503)
The flip side of having "premature opinions" is that, at the very least, you gained a lot of data points early on :).
It's kind of like with assembling a tricky 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. You assemble the frame first (like everyone always does), and wonder how to fill it in. You could pick the most obvious feature on the reference picture, start there and focus on expanding it piece by piece until the picture is done. But what I imagine most people do is first speculatively placing all the pieces that seem trivial to match to corresponding picture features, in order to reduce the number of unplaced pieces quickly, and give themselves lots of starting points to expand their solution in parallel. This approach is useful despite it commonly turning out later that some of such early starting points are placed completely wrong - puzzle blobs get easier to position correctly once they grow in size.
It's a long way of saying, if you keep track of confidence levels of your beliefs, instead of taking everything you read on the Internet as certain, even off-hand remarks on HN can be useful in navigating the enormous space of technologies and philosophies that form the software industry.
It's kind of like with assembling a tricky 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle. You assemble the frame first (like everyone always does), and wonder how to fill it in. You could pick the most obvious feature on the reference picture, start there and focus on expanding it piece by piece until the picture is done. But what I imagine most people do is first speculatively placing all the pieces that seem trivial to match to corresponding picture features, in order to reduce the number of unplaced pieces quickly, and give themselves lots of starting points to expand their solution in parallel. This approach is useful despite it commonly turning out later that some of such early starting points are placed completely wrong - puzzle blobs get easier to position correctly once they grow in size.
It's a long way of saying, if you keep track of confidence levels of your beliefs, instead of taking everything you read on the Internet as certain, even off-hand remarks on HN can be useful in navigating the enormous space of technologies and philosophies that form the software industry.