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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   3670 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for July 23, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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How the heck do you people program all day without pulling your hair out? I've spent 5+ hours just trying to clone a jupyter lab notebook from GitHub and open it, and good lord even with GPT's help it's like pulling teeth.

Infrastructure stuff (like fiddling with repos and dependencies) is boring and frustrating. No one likes that stuff. But if everything is working smoothly and you can just focus on actual coding for an extended period of time then it’s fun.

My experience is that programming is like 98% fiddling with infrastructure stuff though…

Depends on what you’re doing.

If you’re doing a bunch of short projects in a row, possibly all using different languages and different frameworks etc, then yeah you’ll feel like you’re spending most of your time doing setup.

On bigger, longer-lived projects, there will be longer stretches of time where the infrastructure “just works” and you can focus on the code.

Ahh that's an interesting point, and does make a lot of sense. Perhaps I just haven't gone deep enough in the past to appreciate the nice side of things. Good to know.

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