| I agree on many but not all of these points. This list is setting some expectations, and what I mean is that some programmers here will see this list since it’s trending on HN and lose their self esteem or try to forcefully change their behavior to meet this bar. > A lazy programmer is super efficient, does in a couple of hours what would take a whole day to others, so that they can spend the rest of they lingering on the couch feasting on Netflix. This is a crazy high, unrealistic bar. It’s almost comical. > A lazy programmer startes at the code for hours, trying to figure out the way to write as little code as possible. I may or may not want someone on my team to do this, depending on what it is their working on, its significance, etc. but staring at your code for hours on anything you work on probably means you’re not great at making trade offs and haven’t considered if what you’re doing is actually worth trying to over optimize. > A lazy programmer uses the basic UI template the hosting service provides them and then they say it’s brutalism. This is some pretentious gate keeping. Does the lazy programmer also hack into government “mainframes” in 10 seconds? > A lazy programmer do not deploy in production, they instruct Jenkins to do that. Therefore a lazy programmer is not afraid of deploying on Friday afternoon. Jenkins isn’t a solution to when you deploy. You could have all the tooling for effortless deployments but not have enough test cases, canaries, etc. And your software failing, especially if it’s a service, could have a blast radius that now impacts several other teams and their on calls on a late Friday. And it might not even realistically be in your control to get the automation quality to the bar you’d love to have because of competing priorities and ROI. If you’re someone young at HN, please take this stuff with a grain of salt. This document sets realistic standards of what it means to be a lazy programmer (in a good way) the way the Kardashians set standards on beauty with their fake photoshopped Instagram images. |
It's easy to write a lot of code really fast. Then bolt in on an existing application and write as much code doing the bolting as you wrote initially.
Reading a lot means getting an understanding of what you are about to extend, figuring out the best way of doing it and what's already provided by the application.