| The head-banging gets less and less over time. Or else I've developed a thick skull, not sure which. Experience makes a huge difference - simply because you've seen this problem before, or at least seen this kind of problem before, or maybe you saw the solution to this problem a year ago when you were googling the solution to some other problem and tucked it away in a cavity in your brain. With experience, you happen to know that there are certain kinds of many-to-many relationships Hibernate can't map in a legacy schema where the foreign key is a subset of a composite primary key. So when you encounter that on your next project you drop right down to SQL, to the wonder and bewilderment of your new colleagues whom you've just converted to an ORM tool because it "abstracts away all that sql stuff". With experience, you know the kinds of ways certain systems go wrong, the kinds of solutions and workarounds to apply, and most importantly the kinds of things to google for when hunting for the solution. Even scanning search results pages - to a novice they're homogeneous, but after some time you start ignoring whole classes of results. For example, you're trying to find what some annoying ActiveRecord exception is about, and you realise half of your search results are pointers to subversion log messages mirrored in a thousand places all over the internet. And they don't have the information you're looking for. As some other commenters observed, you have to push and solve those problems that seem impossible, because the next time around, you'll find the answer a little faster. Keep up the head-banging. It eventually turns into supernatural powers. Just be careful with the wall. |