The Best Programmers

So just a quick recommendation — this blog post has a lot of good stuff:

https://endler.dev/2025/best-programmers/

The most important to me would be:

📑Read the Reference

If there was one thing that I should have done as a young programmer, it would have been to read the reference of the thing I was using. I.e. read the Apache Webserver Documentation, the Python Standard Library, or the TOML spec.

Don’t go to Stack Overflow, don’t ask the LLM, don’t guess, just go straight to the source. Oftentimes, it’s surprisingly accessible and well-written.

Also, in “the source” I’d include the source code — many times clicking “go to definition” is what separates amateurs from real pros.

📖Read The Error Message

As in Really Read the Error Message and Try to Understand What’s Written. Turns out, if you just sit and meditate about the error message, it starts to speak to you. The best engineers can infer a ton of information from very little context. Just by reading the error message, you can fix most of the problems on your own.

Yeah, so I can’t remember the number of times I’ve seen people or caught myself just skimming the error message without trying to understand it, and wasting time just “trying again, maybe it’ll work this time” (this sometimes works for timeout errors, though :) ).

At least copy the message into Google and/or ChatGPT.

🙌 Have Patience

You need patience with computers and humans. Especially with yourself. Not everything will work right away and people take time to learn. It’s not that people around you are stupid; they just have incomplete information. Without patience, it will feel like the world is against you and everyone around you is just incompetent. That’s a miserable place to be. You’re too clever for your own good.

(emphasis on “Especially with yourself” mine).

Yes, software development is often “coffee, coffee, coffee” and “go, go, go” (I’m on a roll, baby!), and “fuck, fuck, fuck” (what’s happening, why is everything falling apart?!?), and then “omg, I suck, everything sucks, I’m never gonna figure this out!”, and then “fuck yeah, fuck yeah, fuck yeah” (I’m a genius!). A bit of a rollercoaster.

But if you don’t have patience with yourself, you can easily get overwhelmed by the “fuck, fuck, fuck” and especially the “omg, I suck” moments. So, take a breath, you’ll figure this out, because you always…

⛓️‍💥 Break Down Problems

Everyone gets stuck at times. The best know how to get unstuck. They simplify problems until they become digestible. That’s a hard skill to learn and requires a ton of experience. Alternatively, you just have awesome problem-solving skills, e.g., you’re clever. If not, you can train it, but there is no way around breaking down hard problems. There are problems in this world that are too hard to solve at once for anyone involved.

If you work as a professional developer, that is the bulk of the work you get paid to do: breaking down problems. If you do it right, it will feel like cheating: you just solve simple problems until you’re done.

OMG, yes: “If you do it right, it will feel like cheating: you just solve simple problems until you’re done.”

I’m not going to copy-paste the whole blog post here, obviously. Feel free to go to the source!