The Senior Developer's Secret: It's Just Practice

Description

A six-panel comic strip by artist Sarah Andersen, in her signature black-and-white, expressive cartoon style. The left column features a wide-eyed character with a hair bun, looking increasingly mystified. The right column shows a character with spiky black hair and a striped shirt, diligently working at a desk. In the first panel, the bun character asks, 'How do you program so well?'. The artist character replies, 'Practice.'. In the third panel, the bun character speculates, 'It must be an innate gift... A gift from God...'. The artist character calmly retorts, 'It's practice.'. Finally, in the fifth panel, the bun character muses, 'I'll never understand how some people are so talented... A mystery...'. The artist, still working, simply says again, 'Practice.'. The comic humorously skewers the common misconception that programming prowess is a magical, innate talent. For experienced developers, it's a relatable affirmation that their hard-won skills are the result of countless hours of effort, debugging, and continuous learning, not some mysterious gift. It reflects the grind behind mastery that outsiders or juniors often don't see

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DeveloperHumor CodingHumor LearningCurve LearningToCodeJourney ContinuousLearning DeveloperGrowth DeveloperMotivation ImposterSyndrome

Comments

Anonymous ★ Top Pick Some believe great programmers are born with a gift. The rest of us know it's just a decade of Stockholm syndrome with a compiler

Anonymous ★ Top Pick

Some believe great programmers are born with a gift. The rest of us know it's just a decade of Stockholm syndrome with a compiler
Anonymous

“Innate gift” is just what juniors call the muscle memory you acquire after enough 3 a.m. rollbacks that your fingers can SSH, git cherry-pick, and kubectl apply before your brain finishes swearing
Anonymous

Same energy as explaining to the board why the legacy system rewrite will take 18 months when "it's just moving some data around" and watching them conclude you're sandbagging because the vendor said their AI can do it in 3 weeks
Anonymous

Senior engineers know the secret: that 'rockstar 10x developer' everyone mythologizes? They're just someone who debugged the same class of error 10,000 times. The real divine intervention is having the discipline to practice when Stack Overflow is down
Anonymous

People think it’s a gift; it’s just practice - rollbacks, logs until they confess, and deleting yesterday’s clever abstraction before it ossifies into an API
Anonymous

Talent is just a well-tuned L2 cache of past production outages, warmed by years of practice
Anonymous

Practice: politely admitting you've debugged more race conditions than juniors have written 'Hello World'
@sylfn 5y

... a gift from God ... Atheistic programmers: ...
@godhide 5y

✅
@cheburgenashka 5y

Some people cannot into abstract thinking and breaking the jail of walls formed by the wrong interpretation of poorly chosen words
1. @beton_kruglosu_totchno 5y
  
  that and also a lot of people do not have inner speech at all or rarely
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  I believe you meant — an inner voice, instead of what was suggest by your translation app. Anyway translating it back to Russian doesn't give me a clue for your original meaning, that probably lost in bad translation.
  
  @beton_kruglosu_totchno 5y
  
  translation app lmao https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/exan65/today_i_told_my_mom_that_i_have_no_internal/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/711k5u/does_anyone_else_have_a_lack_of_inner_speech/ Do these people use translation apple too?
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  That's a bunch of foreigners with a good practice of Engrish without the actual talent in English. Anglophones just say: it sounded better in my head. Someone's adding: awkward...
  
  @beton_kruglosu_totchno 5y
  
  So what was your point when you said "ur translation app"? Do you understand that saying "inner speech" is not at all uncommon? @RiedleroD can we have a rule against this dude pls
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  It's just sounded as a poor translation. Given that you're having a Russophone name I had the audacity to assume it was a bad translation from Russian, which is one of three of my mother tongues.
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  Are you asking to ban me or something?
  
  @RiedleroD 5y
  
  why exactly should there be a rule against him?
  
  @itsnotjustjack 5y
  
  The wiki article on this goes "An internal monologue, also called self-talk, inner speech, inner discourse or internal discourse, is a person's inner voice..." so you can just wrap it up guys you're both winners
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  Perhaps, sounded weird to me, as speech is usually directed. From orator towards audience. Not something you naturally expect inside a single person with himself. Also, such an “inner speech” (with yourself about something you wish to analyse before saying) is called reflection in terms of psychology.
  
  @itsnotjustjack 5y
  
  Now, now, no reason to get on the defensive, you made your point
  
  @beton_kruglosu_totchno 5y
  
  Looking back, I now see that I probably got defensive when I replied to this message. It's kind of funny to suggest that a person uses translation app to post in chat, I thought you were mocking me.
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  Absolutely not. I'm using such a method in Persian chats and Google translate is still pretty bad in this language.
@cheburgenashka 5y

So yeah. It's a talent, and practice is just a booster for it
1. @RiedleroD 5y
  
  practice is the main part. I was able to read blazing fast in my younger years, but as I stopped reading as much, I eventually got to the point of only reading at moderate to average speeds.
  
  @cheburgenashka 5y
  
  Practicing bad practices is also a practice. But not the one a true master need. Yet any idiot can easily master by investing time into it.
  
  @RiedleroD 5y
  
  well yes
  
  @RiedleroD 5y
  
  another self-example: I make music. Well, I had a break of almost three months recently, and now I've struggled with my newest track (which btw was released today)
@cheburgenashka 5y

You know, fisherman who can fish with a carpenter tools is an awesome master that can handle any tool. But if fisherman makes money daily from fishing with a carpenter tools then it's an idiot with a lot of practice in fishing using carpetner tools. A lot of practice.
@cheburgenashka 5y

Only capability of abstract thinking can give you an ability to evolve and if you have enough agility of your mind and stamina to practice new ways. That's more of the talent than practice. You can be master in COBOL or other obsolete tech. It won't make you more productive or less error prone. C'est la vie mon ami.
@cheburgenashka 5y

A rare talent nowadays.
@RoadManiacBaba 5y

Keep arguing this is fun
@RoadManiacBaba 5y

And yeah I agree u can keep practising it wrong which is worse than never practising it

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The Senior Developer's Secret: It's Just Practice

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