I started before the guide was published. I am 40 years in on challenging myself and learning and improving and there remains so much more I have the opportunity to master.
From my experience, just to say the thing that many such articles never mentioned, because the author has the innate ability anyway:
Seek mental stability, or whatever mental state that can push you to programming for 10 years without completely burning you out. If you can’t even do some programming after a relatively easy work day, you are burnt out.
It’s okay to recognise when you’ve had enough. If your workday involves programming, ours pretty normal (for me at least) to not want to do more programming at home. You gotta let yourself miss it a bit if you want to want it.
These days, I'm not sure anymore. I learned through self-study, reading documents. I don't have a degree, and I don't have the exceptional talent to be involved in language standardization.
Everyone around me codes with AI, and most of them produce better results than I do. That's natural. I'm good at some things, but I'm bad at many others. I still hand-code occasionally, but now the main is AI coding, and hand-coding is the sub.
This document probably held true until about 3 or 4 years ago. But since last year, I'm not sure. I have nothing to say other than 'Just do it.'
People say vibe coding has security issues, but honestly, I have security issues in my own code too, from TTL and all that. In the end, with vibe coding, knowing the right security keywords and understanding the problems seems to come from experience anyway.
Reading 'So You Want to be a Programmer,' I feel like conversations with other programmers and the whole process of being a programmer feel distant to me now. Since AI came out, I barely talk about programming with other programmers.
It's not just me—most Korean programmers around me are the same. The reason is simple: those kinds of programming discussions make us realize how limited our knowledge is, since our understanding is often filtered through English sources and then translated into Korean. So we just end up not talking to each other about it.
When I saw this document about 4 or 5 years ago, it felt like it was absolutely true. The environment has changed drastically, and reading this again now. Back then I treated it like a Bible, but not anymore. I realize that if you don't have a degree or aren't a native English speaker, there was always a limit to how much you could participate. These days, everything is changing so fast. As AI breaks down the English barrier, the quality of materials I can read has gone up, and I'm starting to think that even programming mindsets might change depending on language background.
Still, I think I'll keep hand-coding. Not because it's more productive, but purely because I enjoy it as a hobby. AI writes better code than I do, but hand-coding is still enjoyable enough as a hobby
I don't personally know anyone who writes code any more (for work). Is this not the case for you?
The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less).
This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.
Programming without writing, to me, feels like doing mathematics by reading proofs but not doing proofs. Which quite frankly works very poorly for me. I write code if, for nothing else, so that I can spot bad code/proofs with an easier time, rather than dealing with an equation that blew up in prod.
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Seek mental stability, or whatever mental state that can push you to programming for 10 years without completely burning you out. If you can’t even do some programming after a relatively easy work day, you are burnt out.
BTW ^ is my state nowadays.
Everyone around me codes with AI, and most of them produce better results than I do. That's natural. I'm good at some things, but I'm bad at many others. I still hand-code occasionally, but now the main is AI coding, and hand-coding is the sub.
This document probably held true until about 3 or 4 years ago. But since last year, I'm not sure. I have nothing to say other than 'Just do it.'
People say vibe coding has security issues, but honestly, I have security issues in my own code too, from TTL and all that. In the end, with vibe coding, knowing the right security keywords and understanding the problems seems to come from experience anyway.
Reading 'So You Want to be a Programmer,' I feel like conversations with other programmers and the whole process of being a programmer feel distant to me now. Since AI came out, I barely talk about programming with other programmers.
It's not just me—most Korean programmers around me are the same. The reason is simple: those kinds of programming discussions make us realize how limited our knowledge is, since our understanding is often filtered through English sources and then translated into Korean. So we just end up not talking to each other about it.
When I saw this document about 4 or 5 years ago, it felt like it was absolutely true. The environment has changed drastically, and reading this again now. Back then I treated it like a Bible, but not anymore. I realize that if you don't have a degree or aren't a native English speaker, there was always a limit to how much you could participate. These days, everything is changing so fast. As AI breaks down the English barrier, the quality of materials I can read has gone up, and I'm starting to think that even programming mindsets might change depending on language background.
Still, I think I'll keep hand-coding. Not because it's more productive, but purely because I enjoy it as a hobby. AI writes better code than I do, but hand-coding is still enjoyable enough as a hobby
The distinction I see now is between teams that read PRs and teams that don't. I still think the former is a good approach... for now, but I don't expect this will necessarily be the case in a year (or less).
This article was such an inspiration to me when I was younger, and the advice, for that time, was very correct. However seeing it today really drives home how big the gap is going to be in really understanding code in just a few more years.
I hear this from time to time. But I still write code at my job. I'm not a software engineer and I don't work for a software engineering firm.
There are HS interns at my company who admire me because I lived through a time without AI and I actually had to learn that stuff. I’m not kidding.