by nayuki | 2025-04-09 17:10:11+00:00
Excellent article that resonates with me a lot.

> Read the Reference

> If there was one thing that I should have done as a young programmer, it would have been to read the reference of the thing I was using. I.e. read the Apache Webserver Documentation, the Python Standard Library, or the TOML spec.

> Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written.

This is underrated. When I was a beginner at programming, I read books like "Sams Teach Yourself Java in 21 Days" and various O'Reilly books such as CSS. But over time, I drifted over to reading online documentation, and mostly from primary sources such as documentation that comes with the language. For example, I read Sun/Oracle's Javadoc web pages and Python's standard library web pages instead of any third-party summary of it; I read the Java Language Specification as well as new improvements in JSR/JEP pages; I read MDN web pages instead of books (I'm aware of W3C spec pages but they are too dense for daily use; I only consult them for rare edge cases and ambiguity). I learned Rust from first-party tutorials ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/ ) and not someone else's rehash; the first-party material is excellent and hard to beat.

This doesn't apply to everything, though. I don't think there is a good first-party tutorial or reference for C and C++. I still don't know what the best tutorials are out there, but my favorite reference is https://en.cppreference.com/w/ , which is clearly a third party.

Also, as I get more experienced over the years, I drift into reading the source code of the applications and libraries that I use, and sometimes read mailing lists / issues / pull requests to see or participate in the software development process.

> An expert goes in (after reading the reference!) and sits down to write a config for the tool of which they understand every single line and can explain it to a colleague. That leaves no room for doubt!

I work under this philosophy, but it can be extremely hard. I still have trouble understanding what every line of a Maven XML file (Java build tool) does. Ant (for Java) was similarly opaque. I've seen way too many tutorials that have an ethos of "just copy this example code and modify a few bits without questioning the rest, trust us about it".

> Read The Error Message

The failure of the user to read computer error messages is a source of IT jokes since forever ago.

> Most awesome engineers are well-spoken and happy to share knowledge. The best have some outlet for their thoughts: blogs, talks, open source, or a combination of those.

Check. I have a website and repositories of open-source code authored by me.

> Never Stop Learning; Build a Reputation; Don’t Be Afraid to Say “I Don’t Know”

Check to all.

> Clever engineers write clever code. Exceptional engineers write simple code.

This is something I always strive to do - make the code as simple as possible while still solving the problem (such as functional and performance requirements). I sometimes find myself de-optimizing code to sacrifice a bit of speed in exchange for shorter code and better human comprehension.