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From novice to master, and back again (2013)

by mre on 8/9/22, 2:22 PM with 143 comments

  • by dmd on 8/9/22, 4:46 PM

    Twice in the last decade I've been completely stuck on something, googled extensively, finally found the answer ... which I wrote, on Usenet, 25 years ago.

  • by nu11ptr on 8/9/22, 6:51 PM

    I can't even tell you how often this happens to me. People come to me because I wrote something and I then tell them: "Let me go read the manual" (because I can't remember what I did a month later, so I'm always consulting my own docs).

    I always tell people: "You think I wrote this manual for you, but I'm not that altruistic. I wrote it for future me."

    To be fair, not exactly the same thing. I typically remember I wrote it, just not what it does or how it works. :-)

  • by focusedone on 8/9/22, 3:37 PM

    Wow, epic!

    The most depressing thing is being presented with an issue and finding my name attached to a closed ticket from years before with no explanation of how I fixed it.

    Guess what, current me, you're going to learn this again from scratch because past me was in a hurry and couldn't be bothered to type out what he did.

    BSG - this has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

  • by BlakeCam on 8/9/22, 4:22 PM

    When I began studying physics I felt like a clueless novice. All those equations looked like chicken-scratch on paper. And, "What's the difference between kinetic and potential energy?" And there were so many concepts to understand - forces, masses, fields, charges, and particles. And differential equations seemed incomprehensible. Now, after a few decades I've mastered most all of that. Yet, when I try to grasp the real basics, like "What is space-time?", "How does superposition lead to a single macroscopic universe?", "What is the Higgs field?", "How did this universe 'start'?", "What exactly is mass?", then I realize I'm really back at novice again. I know almost nothing.

  • by klez on 8/9/22, 6:37 PM

    Reading the comments here I'm under the impression that people think OP wrote the manual for `su`, but the interesting fact here is he wrote the GNU coreutils implementation of `su` itself.

    Debian (stable, at least) doesn't use his version anymore. The HISTORY section of the current manual says

    > This su command was derived from coreutils' su, which was based on an implementation by David MacKenzie. The util-linux version has been refactored by Karel Zak.

  • by chrisbrandow on 8/9/22, 3:02 PM

    That’s a real, “I’ve forgotten more about X than you’ll ever know moment”!

  • by 100011_100001 on 8/9/22, 3:18 PM

    I find my personal memory is very ephemeral, without repetition, things get quickly forgotten. In a long enough timeline, about 1-3 year, I start to fail recognizing my own code. Since I have trained most Jr Devs I work with they all have similar coding patterns as me, which makes it even harder.

    Granted, I have specific code tells, which helps, but like the article mentions I have forgotten the why or the bug that I fixed that required specific changes.

  • by hinkley on 8/9/22, 5:55 PM

    I write this shit down so I don’t have to remember it, thanks.

    Back in the age of modems, when PPP was still the new hotness, I was proud of myself for memorizing the IP addresses for a few of the services I used regularly. Two or three times I got to punk my friends when the DNS servers got messed up, and they’re sitting with me in the computer lab wondering what else we could do to pass the time when they looked over and noticed that I’m happily typing away in the very thing they couldn’t get into because The Internet Is Down. No man, it’s just DNS.

    Older, sadder but wiser me knows that I still could have done that joke if I had written the numbers on a scrap of paper. I could have had twenty instead of five.

  • by dang on 8/9/22, 6:17 PM

    Related:

    From Novice to Master, and Back Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9098635 - Feb 2015 (1 comment)

    From Novice to Master, and Back Again - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8443981 - Oct 2014 (27 comments)

  • by bsedlm on 8/9/22, 2:48 PM

    yes. I think most of us who programmed in the trenches are familiar with forgetting what we've done...

    the difference is that nothing I've ever worked on will ever be public or useful beyond a small private business which doesn't even exist anymore.

  • by hcks on 8/9/22, 3:42 PM

    This reminds me of an old joke I heard a while back, which is that the opposite of "it's like riding a bike" is "it's like the UNIX command line".

    No matter how many times you do it, you will have to re-learn it every single time.

  • by yuan43 on 8/9/22, 8:37 PM

    This is one reason answering questions on StackOverflow is so rewarding. You can save future you a ton of trouble by putting a (better) answer there and then stumbling onto it later. Ditto blog posts. Power tip: this also works for personal journals in searchable format.

  • by vxNsr on 8/9/22, 2:57 PM

    Love stories like this, few people can claim to have truly forgotten more than us novices will ever know but he surely can.

  • by sergiotapia on 8/9/22, 4:45 PM

    15 years working as a software dev. There have been many times Sergio from the past has saved my ass. I find exactly what I needed to get something done and turns out the author was me. Coworkers also sometimes find my stuff so that's a nice feeling.

    If you write code do yourself a favor and write for future you. It'll help.

  • by sneak on 8/9/22, 3:02 PM

    "This incident will be reported."

  • by mayoff on 8/10/22, 12:06 AM

    1. Have problem.

    2. Google it.

    3. Find answer on stackoverflow.

    4. Try to upvote.

    5. "You can't vote for your own post."

    This has happened to me multiple times.

  • by jimhefferon on 8/9/22, 4:00 PM

    I've had that happen with math teaching material a couple of times. One time I was dissatisfied with how I presented the definition of implication so I googled. The top link was to a discussion where the person answering linked to me. Like DJM, I found it a little unsettling.

  • by skybrian on 8/9/22, 5:05 PM

    We write things down so we don’t have to rely on memory. Working as intended.

  • by itsthecourier on 8/9/22, 6:38 PM

    Once I had a question about APACS, circa 2008, not a lot of information. found a tool using it, some lateral browsing, dns, simmilar usernames and finally i got to talk to the authour of the tool who gladly helped me :)

    I was discussing how the only info I found was in a remote wikipedia article, yet incomplete. the guy told me he had written that article too.

    good times

  • by sireat on 8/9/22, 7:39 PM

    I live by command line history and timestamps.

    I wish there was even better way to preserve the context of what you were doing at the time (env variables, current path at the time etc).

  • by startupdiscuss on 8/9/22, 3:12 PM

    Zen Koan:

    Before I began my studies in Zen, I thought a tree was a tree and a stone, a stone.

    When I started to study Zen, I could see that a tree was not a tree, and a stone was not a stone.

    Now that I am a Zen master, I know that a tree is a tree and a stone is a stone.

    -- Source: my buddy in college

    I think you come full circle to learn that you can only keep so much in your head at one time and that you're always in some sense loading up what you need for the next month or three. At least this time you knew to look for the man su command, and remind yourself of the work you did, that you shared with all these other people.