Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a better developer?

Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a be... by fit2rule on Monday February 16, 2015 @02:37PM (#9058758)

Wow, I'm quite literally floored by what is completely and utterly missing from this entire discussion: The User.

It doesn't matter what or how you program, as long as you have: The User.

If you have to spend your time competitively learning some new-fangled slippery, slidey, pretty little ball of tangled chains of bits and pieces of - whatever - it doesn't matter for a fig if you don't have: The User.

With The User as the principle focus of your goals and career as a developer, programmer, coder, hacker, binder-of-pretty-gthings, you can escape all misery and just learn to enjoy the ride completely. Because its The Users' bus, and if you don't have The User driving it, it ain't going no-Where.

So the whole perspective about Industry standards and real reasons for just using one thing, and one thing only, and sticking to it and becoming good at it: this is only ever acknowledged, worth a fig, if you have: The User. I've still got users of 20+ year old software stacks that I'd love to replace with some newfangled jangle. Have you?

That is how you prepare yourself for a career, in service of The User.

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Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a be... by angersock on Monday February 16, 2015 @04:18PM (#9059090)

Question was how to get better as a developer and engineer--relying on The User is the worst possible way of solving that problem, because they don't care anything about the tech...they just want results.

Your advice is correct about how to get better serving users, but that was very much not the question being asked.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Thoughts on Rich Hickey's advice on becoming a be... by fit2rule on Monday February 16, 2015 @04:59PM (#9059320)

Well, I really mean that in spite of whatever you do to improve yourself as a developer/engineer, it doesn't mean a thing if you don't have a User. Ever.

And even if Developers can themselves be Users, in the sense that they gain some sort of joy out of consuming the developer tools of the trade, its still just navel-gazing until there is actually some sort of use out of the activity.

Real developers build things for users. It doesn't matter how good or bad they are, as developers, if there is a User: win.

[ Parent | on HN ]