
Programming reminds me of my stand up comedy days (2018) - songzme
https://medium.com/@kevinyckim33/how-programming-reminds-me-of-my-stand-up-comedy-days-5522722c4d73
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JabavuAdams
"Whenever I catch myself wondering whether this function I’m writing is going
to crash or not, I remind myself to just run the tests or the app."

One lesson that often comes later in one's programming journey is that there
are surprisingly, shockingly, many bugs that won't be found by just running
the code. Like you're debugging one thing, and you find this other thing that
has been in the shipped code for a year, intermittently causing crashes, but
no one was the wiser. The "how could this possibly be working?" moment.

So, I fully embrace the idea of of incremental ground-up development, but
running the code just to see if it crashes is too low a bar. Beginner versus
craftsperson. I would suggest a high-value compromise is to single-step
through any function that you just wrote. This has revealed a huge number of
logic errors to me, even without writing additional tests. It's super low-
hanging fruit that a lot of people don't even pick. I think that suggestion
came from Code Complete, which although old, is still a great resource for
beginning programmers. I also recommend The Pragmatic Programmer.

EDIT> Liked the article. Am also interested in standup. Also just recently had
a very productive couple of evenings kit-bashing together some wood scraps
where the tactile nature of holding a battery here, there, trying to orient it
etc. seems to have been vastly more productive than sitting down with
Solidworks or overthinking the early design.

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AshleysBrain
I've been surprised at being able to draw parallels between programming and
music performance, writing and more. I think there's plenty in common at a
high level when working on a creative project of any kind, such as your
attitude to improvement, dealing with setbacks, analysing results, and the joy
of when it all comes together!

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DenisM
OTOH humans are wired to find patterns, existent or imaginary if it comes to
that.

Perhaps more important is the act itself of pondering your occupation - doing
it long enough is bound to yield insights.

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qznc
Yes. The point of this article is not that you can learn something about
programming by doing stand up comedy. You cannot. The point is that you can
learn something about programming (by doing it) and make it memorable via
analogy. In this case the analogy is comedy, but the actual topic does not
really matter.

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qznc
> Whenever I catch myself wondering whether this function I’m writing is going
> to crash or not, I remind myself to just run the tests or the app. The
> terminal and the browser will always have the answer.

This is not generally true. It works if you program for fun. It does not work
on critical software. It works for more programming projects than it should.

~~~
ThalesX
When I was a junior, I was trying to debug a piece of software. I was
attaching my .NET debugger to the thing and just running line by line like a
madman trying to catch a race condition.

The technical team lead had a sit down with me where we just inspected the
functions and reasoned about them. It was eye opening just how fast we found
the fault and the understanding I had after actually reasoning about the
system.

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hyperpallium
I agree with getting started.

If Michelangelo iterated studies (in marble!) and drafts to work out mistakes
and what he was doing, surely I can too.

BTW Seinfeld showed his (long) development of his "pop-tart" joke:
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s](https://youtube.com/watch?v=itWxXyCfW5s)

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phirschybar
this is great. I have actually met 3 developers in the course of my career who
went from standup to programming. Those are also the only 3 standups I have
ever met!! Never understood the connection until now!

