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by andrewmcwatters
3866 days ago
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Yep, I feel the same way. I don't really like tinkering, though. I don't like the mindset of tinkerers, either. Every tinkerer I've come across has never finished anything of substantial size, and every one I've met had terrible programming habits, or such strongly opinionated views, you couldn't work with them or discuss something you liked because it wasn't inline with their holy views of writing god-awful code. When I pursue a project, I work on it in terms of 10s of thousands of lines of code over a 2-4+ year span of time. When I take up small projects, I make sure they're useful for production purposes. I often think about the portfolios of people like this, a large number of repositories to show for, and nothing ever particularly useful. Everything is a gimmick, and nothing ever took serious architectural decision making on a grand scale. |
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Code quality is for the most part subjective. Sure there are standards or general conventions, but these differ largely between codebases and languages. Some people take this to extremes, especially if they're not used to coding with other programmers.
> When I take up small projects, I make sure they're useful for production purposes.
> ...
> I often think about the portfolios of people like this, a large number of repositories to show for, and nothing ever particularly useful.
That's fine, but some of us tinker and hack for a different reason: knowledge and curiosity's sake. For me (Although I know it also applies to a few other people I know), the sole goal is learning and experimenting -- a working project is just a bonus. Occasionally I'll code a tool to make life easier, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all.
> When I pursue a project, I work on it in terms of 10s of thousands of lines of code over a 2-4+ year span of time.
It's great that you have the energy to do that, but I (and I can't speak for anyone else here) simply don't have the energy to devote my time to a single project over a long period of time. I find it wears me out, and after a while programming turns into drudge-work. Not to mention there are always fun cool little projects popping into my head.