Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

theodp writes "Raw intellect ain't always all it's cracked up to be, advises Ted Dziuba in his introduction to Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier, so don't be too stubborn to learn the things that can save you from the headaches of over-engineering. Here's some sample how-to-avoid-over-complicating-things advice: 'If Linux can do it, you shouldn't. Don't use Hadoop MapReduce until you have a solid reason why xargs won't solve your problem. Don't implement your own lockservice when Linux's advisory file locking works just fine. Don't do image processing work with PIL unless you have proven that command-line ImageMagick won't do the job. Modern Linux distributions are capable of a lot, and most hard problems are already solved for you. You just need to know where to look.' Any cautionary tips you'd like to share from your own experience?"

Comments

faggot

[Anonymous Coward]

cunt nigger

Re:faggot

[IllusionalForce]

>>> cunt nigger
  File "<stdin>", line 1
    cunt nigger
              ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax
>>>

Thank you for this great tip!

Here's MY list

[.Bruce Perens]

Programming Things I Wish I Knew Earlier

1. Don't get into programming and do something else.
2. Bathe periodically.
3. Dried cum on your keyboard looks like donut glaze, but tastes radically different.
4. Open Source is a great idea, but altruism doesn't pay the rent.
5. Parents will eventually charge rent.
6. You can't get your name removed from Diakantana's credits.
7. CTL-C, CTL-V. Took me 15 years until someone showed me that shortcut.
8. The sun, it burns.
9. As far as your family is concerned, "network admin," "programming," "database management," ... to them, it's all "computers."
10. Linux sucks.

Shit Coders Like Nkwe

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always spot the shit coders like Nkwe.

99 percent of the precious comments he writes are:

* Of absolutely no use - glorified versions of // set x to zero

* Flat out wrong compared to the actual code

Crappy programmers like Nkwe are most often motivated by the terror of being in a field the have no business being in. They hope by constantly spouting their desperate pleas to comment code that they will be able to grasp what all those smart and competent programmers keep cranking out.

Nkwe, don't fret. The world always needs another ditch digger.

Re:HUH?????

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. The entire article is awful.

newfangled stuff is not worth the risk

That's why you test new stuff, idiot.

If you have a process running and you want it to be restarted automatically if it crashes, use Upstart.

Hang on a minute, new stuff is not worth the risk, apparently. Perhaps when he said "Upstart" he meant "mon", or "monit", or one of the other well established process monitoring tools?

Parallelize When You Have To, Not When You Want To

I'd like to see this wonderkid take his non parallel code and parallelize it in five years time when he realises his non-parallel implementation doesn't scale.

Crap, crap, crap, crap, crap.

Re:The hard way is more fun

[daveime]

Obviously the author had ImageMagick pre-installed on his Linux box, and has never had to actually install the fucker.

What a chore, pages and pages of mumbo-jumbo flying up the shell, then just when you think your done, it turns out it needs all kinds of extra libraries for certain filetypes (installed in VERY specific locations) to handle popular formats like JPG. Why in God's name the supposed "number one image processing solution for Linux" can't even handle JPG out of the box is beyond me.

It's not like you have to pay for the additional libraries, just download them from somewhere else, make some extra incantations, and sacrifice one extra chicken.

Well that's just stupid.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I simply wanted to accomplish work I'd use a Mac.

in

[The Clockwork Troll]

In B4 Persai