Many years ago I was working at a firm that investigated stock pump and dump schemes on Yahoo Finance message boards.
We had to scrape the boards and then analyze messages to see if we could identify the identity of the people running the schemes.
This was 2002 and I wasn't aware that the LWP::Simple existed in Perl (aka the requests library in Python).
I ended up using basic TCP socket libraries to connect to port 80 and do http requests. It was, to put it mildly, a major pain in the ass.
That being said, I learned a TON about how http, tcp, html, etc all work together. 20+ years later, I still use some of that knowledge when analyzing network protocols at work.
I mention this b/c nothing is stopping people from doing similar projects now. e.g. Linux from scratch [0] is one great example of learning fundamentals even though we now have 1 click "launch me a Linux VPS" options.
Joel Spolsky make this point too. Even if you are using Java, it's still helpful to understand how CPUs interact with cache because the highest performance comes from optimizing the whole stack.
I have a tendency to prefer writing my own library for something instead of relying on someone else's. Not always, obviously, but quite often existing libraries fall short or are too complex to use. And solving the problem myself is almost always an educational experience.
For example, I'm currently writing my own graph layout library because I'm not happy with Dagre and ELK.
Same as people often say about AI writing bespoke applications, these days... Libraries (like applications) often have 98% stuff you don't need, and 2% stuff you do. You can end up better off with your own thing.
I've always liked writing my own libraries and minimal frameworks for PHP, which seems to be a very unpopular opinion, but it almost entirely removes churn from your stack, which is nice for tools that may stick around for years or decades. I also never switched off jquery, preferring simple techs. I'm almost definitely operating at a smaller scale than most web developers here, though.
For personal projects that's fine, but I'd absolutely hate to work with someone who is rolling their own libs for everything, and then when they leave the company puts an enormous amount of tech debt into our hands. It also really doesn't make for good team-work if a developer always forces their own opinion on everything.
Yep, I was just about to comment about this but you beat me to it. You know something's amiss when you have to use incognito mode in order for the site to look the way it's supposed to.
uBlock Origin has prevented the following page from loading:
https://tech.criteo.com/blog/human-skills-ai-cant-develop-junior-engineers/
This happened because of the following filter:
||criteo.com^
Apparently Criteo is an advertising tool that collects tons of data from visitors. So why is this blog there? I can't help but wonder if it's part of a scheme to convince people to unblock them.
Not to take away anything from this guy but man, my mind just stops registering information after lines like this: `As a Junior fresh out of school, “still learning what I’m doing” isn’t a caveat — it’s the job description`
AI generates syntax fast, but syntax was never the bottleneck. If you do not learn the low-level fundamentals, you just become an editor for an intern who hallucinates.
Many years ago I was working at a firm that investigated stock pump and dump schemes on Yahoo Finance message boards.
We had to scrape the boards and then analyze messages to see if we could identify the identity of the people running the schemes.
This was 2002 and I wasn't aware that the LWP::Simple existed in Perl (aka the requests library in Python).
I ended up using basic TCP socket libraries to connect to port 80 and do http requests. It was, to put it mildly, a major pain in the ass.
That being said, I learned a TON about how http, tcp, html, etc all work together. 20+ years later, I still use some of that knowledge when analyzing network protocols at work.
I mention this b/c nothing is stopping people from doing similar projects now. e.g. Linux from scratch [0] is one great example of learning fundamentals even though we now have 1 click "launch me a Linux VPS" options.
Joel Spolsky make this point too. Even if you are using Java, it's still helpful to understand how CPUs interact with cache because the highest performance comes from optimizing the whole stack.
0 - https://www.linuxfromscratch.org/
I have a tendency to prefer writing my own library for something instead of relying on someone else's. Not always, obviously, but quite often existing libraries fall short or are too complex to use. And solving the problem myself is almost always an educational experience.
For example, I'm currently writing my own graph layout library because I'm not happy with Dagre and ELK.
Also, your own library, at this point, is much less of an attack vector than some dependency from a package manager
Same as people often say about AI writing bespoke applications, these days... Libraries (like applications) often have 98% stuff you don't need, and 2% stuff you do. You can end up better off with your own thing.
I've always liked writing my own libraries and minimal frameworks for PHP, which seems to be a very unpopular opinion, but it almost entirely removes churn from your stack, which is nice for tools that may stick around for years or decades. I also never switched off jquery, preferring simple techs. I'm almost definitely operating at a smaller scale than most web developers here, though.
For personal projects that's fine, but I'd absolutely hate to work with someone who is rolling their own libs for everything, and then when they leave the company puts an enormous amount of tech debt into our hands. It also really doesn't make for good team-work if a developer always forces their own opinion on everything.
This blog post renders horribly on my Chrome browser. Then I realized it's because Ghostery is blocking a lot of it. Looks okay in Incognito mode.
If your site doesn't load basic UI elements because they're designated as ads, you're not doing it right.
Yep, I was just about to comment about this but you beat me to it. You know something's amiss when you have to use incognito mode in order for the site to look the way it's supposed to.
I'm getting:
Umm, okay? The entire domain is blacklisted?[delayed]
Apparently Criteo is an advertising tool that collects tons of data from visitors. So why is this blog there? I can't help but wonder if it's part of a scheme to convince people to unblock them.
Also known as PR
Not to take away anything from this guy but man, my mind just stops registering information after lines like this: `As a Junior fresh out of school, “still learning what I’m doing” isn’t a caveat — it’s the job description`
AI generates syntax fast, but syntax was never the bottleneck. If you do not learn the low-level fundamentals, you just become an editor for an intern who hallucinates.
I have a disability so I'm already forever midlevel.
Is writing a blog post one of them?
I found all the breaks grating.
The skill required to get an AI to cooperate is not the same one as the craft of coding. Typing what it says out yourself will never get you there.
It’s like calling yourself a mechanic because you brought your car to a shop and paid for a mechanic to do an oil change.