Ah yes, the true shibboleth of taste-havers.
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}I suspect it's a generational gap.
I actually really liked the look of the blog. It gave me a retro vibe, which is obviously what he was going for. But I'm also reading on my phone. Maybe the choice was more annoying on a larger screen.
Tinkering habit is kind of important as even small interactions help to build an internal model of how things work, how to operate them, etc. And this model might generalize.
edit: I lied, the connection is that if you don't try many things, you won't know what's good and what's bad, and if you don't tinker, you won't try many things.
And while I'm talking about artistic quality on HN, I have to take some obligatory potshots at the website in question. When I have to use Safari's reader mode to see what you wrote, something has gone terribly wrong.
> And what I mean by taste here is simply the honed ability to distinguish mediocrity from excellence. This will be highly subjective, and not everyone’s taste will be the same, but that is the point, you should NOT have the same taste as someone else.
Concisely, discernment.
So your comment about “artistic quality” may apply. But from your ends sentence It seems you equate “artistic quality” to aesthetics , and I don’t think that’s what the author intended.
If you could indulge me a bit, the author in me wants to be pedantic about this. :)
In my defense, changing the definition of a term at the end of the article is begging to be misunderstood.
"Taste" is just the degree to which two people value the same things.
When someone is rated as having "good taste" it just means that the person rating them values a lot of the same qualities.
The more I thought about it, the more that applies everywhere: Food, wine, clothes, architecture, software design, etc.
Things I HATE:
1. complaints
2. lists
3. strong opinions
4. hypocrisy> I understood “taste” here to mean opinions.
Good taste is the ability to have nuanced and specific opinions.
This comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45740478 said it well:
> 2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
Combining these two ideas: Taste is the ability to understand the topic/craft/medium well enough to have a strong opinion about what good is, and usually that opinion is similar to other well experienced practitioners.
In software engineering it's the ability to recognize an elegant solution that avoids pitfalls that the observer may have experienced in the past.
In other fields it might be that someone with good taste can better understand and appreciate the process or journey to get to whatever $thing is being evaluated, and they appreciate the $thing more because they can empathize more fully with the creator, compared to a layman.
1. How good or bad something is relative to some standard.
2. How well you're able to understand the medium and identify the differences between things.
A person who doesn't consider themself to have a taste in music and listens casually won't really be able to reason about why they like the music they do other than "I like the band" or "I like the song."
A person with taste in music is going to have listened to a larger variety, be able to speak passionately about it, and justify why they like and dislike particular music.
One is a boneheaded consumer, one is a fanatic.
Similarly with wine, you can't claim you've got taste when you've been drinking only red your whole life.
It is like the details don't register in a usable way, where one of my good friends will tell me he likes a band because of the guitar tone or the drummer's technique or something else that I struggle to explain or even pick out of the music. I wish I could explain my preference better.
If taste is being learned, who is the teacher? Are you learning about your own tastes or adopting the tastes of the teacher?
Who has better taste, the user of spaces or tabs? There is no right answer, just those who agree with you and those who don’t.
One of the greatest developers I've worked with, who I learned a lot from and respect immensely, has extremely different tastes in software from me. To the point where I wouldn't say I think he has good taste.
But, his work still has a distinct style and intention. I can tell anytime I come across libraries he had a hand in. I understand what the code is doing and why is is correct, even when I disagree with it.
And I think that is what is important. When working with more junior people, I'll ask them why they did things a certain way and will generally me be with a "well, idk" of some variant of path dependence.
I think developing that intentionality as a developer is important. Which does come with some amount of aesthetic, and I think taste is a defensible metaphor.
Something I say about complainers applies here:
In the entire history of the world not one thing has ever gotten better by accepting something as it is.
Go ahead and never tinker, but don't delude yourslef it's a virtue. It's merely something you're free to do because it doesn't actively harm anyone else.
tinkering is good when you're < 30 or maybe even < 25
From TFA.
If you don't want to tinker, don't! But it's absurd to suggest that it's only something for children to enjoy. (30 should not be considered near the end of your life btw.) Please don't tell others they should feel bad about learning for fun because they're adults.
s=document.createElement('style');
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document.body.appendChild(s)So I get to be very particular, but also not have to care about tweaking, I did all the work back when I had time for that.
I will argue that if you stare at a screen for hours a day, might as well make it pleasant with good hinting/anti-aliasing/features and a professional font instead of Dejavu Sans lol
That, and the judgmental humblebrag tone leads me to believe the author is young. I suggest they focus more on learning than writing these vapid articles.
Consequently, maybe taste can be acquired by impersonation or purchased, but could be more superficial than taste acquired through deep iterative tinkering and repetition. Much like someone watching a youtube video that tells them so and so is the correct way to do something, therefore it is, and it may be true, but they didn't necessarily learn that organically or in a way that they could analytically discuss.
Incidentally, the person without this type of curiosity is extremely dull to engage in conversation with from the perspective of the curious person, and in the reverse the curious person would seem to be wasting the incurious person's time because they aren't getting to the point and there's no tangible benefit in the conversation.
Incurious people seem like they're the typical tourist or the consumer, eliminating as much inconvenience as possible but not necessarily interested the exploration of the what or why of either the problem or solution, making it hard to identify where the depth is. Good at delegating, but terrible managers.
A lot of other people who like tinkering seem to have a kind of obsession with using all the latest gadgets to solve the tiniest problems. IMO, there's a point when you're so into automation that you end up looking for problems to use your tools on. You end up introducing new problems into your life, just so you can solve them using your tool of choice. Your life becomes like a Rube Goldberg machine.
It's literally stated in the second paragraph: "It’s how I learn." You can learn how the things around you work by tinkering with them.
Of course, you can then ask why someone would want to learn things, or why they enjoy learning, and I honestly don't know how to explain that, but I feel like it's the sort of thing that shouldn't need to be asked.
I keep hearing this same "GitHub Desktop bad, git cli good" take, but I just don't see how the cli can compete terms of things like being able to go through each changed file, see a clean visual representation of all my changes, and to choose exactly what lines I want to commit just by clicking on them.
I've got a few things I made that just bring a lot of joy knowing it's the exact thing I wanted which you can't buy, and couldn't justify paying someone else to make either.
People are just figuring out taste matters for product, so at this pace in 10 years they'll figure out that having novel tastes that aren't just a distillation of the echo chamber you live in matters just as much.
That advice has stuck with me, and I try to have the least taste I can. I use $20 headphones and a $200 TV because I can't tell what "good" is, and I enjoy music and movies as much as my friends with $600 headphones and $3k TVs do.
I purposely just go for hikes for the sake of it, and refuse to give in and buy anything other than a generic bike, even though a part of me really wants __ hardware. If I buy it, that will be the point of no return for becoming a bike nerd and I'll start caring about stuff I don't want to care about.
Now computers, I've learned a million ways to hate them, and learn new ways to hate them every day. Not with bikes, though :)
Typing this out makes me realize its not even about the music anymore, but the tweaks. Let this be a warning
While if you just ignore most of that and buy something mid tier, you feel quite happy because it works pretty well and you didn't spend too much on it. The moment you start scrolling the subreddit for the product you've gone too far and need to disengage.
When my older kid wanted a gaming monitor, he suggested a specific model because it was on sale and he could afford it. I took that opportunity to do some research solo that night, find a few alternatives, research each deeply and then suggest that we "look together at 2 or 3 different models", compare the features, and talked through whether it really mattered if one was $100 more than the other given the likely useful lifespan of a monitor.
He ended up with a monitor that he's really happy with, we got some time together bonding over a shared interest, and he doesn't have to know all the flaws I saw in it. (It's also barely mid-tier, which is congruent with your advice.)
I think there's a saying that you learn decades of music so that you can forget it and just play - fairly similar things here
You learn things to the point of mastery. Mastery proves all the ways things won't work, leaving you with what will.
And often what will work are the fundamentals.
I can give you an example from my experience. I got annoyed by my dull knives, so at first I went and bought really expensive knives, the ones made of hardened high-carbon steel that start rusting if you look at them dirtily. And I spent hours reading reviews before buying them. That's probably the "most expensive cup of coffee" stage.
Then I stumbled upon a Youtube channel that explained how to sharpen knives properly. So I bought $70 worth of diamond sharpening stones and re-sharpened my old IKEA knives. And they started working almost as well as my set of ultra-expensive knives, but they are far more practical. The expensive knife set is now a display piece in my kitchen.
Another revelation for me was that past a certain point, there's really not that much difference in the quality of sushi. It's just rice and sliced fish. Sure, there are individual variations between chefs in rice-to-fish ratio, maybe some special soy sauce here and there, but these are all just matters of personal taste. So I now just enjoy sushi for its taste. And instead of a looking for reservations in expensive restaurants, I just drop by my local sushi place and just ask the chef to add a bit more wasabi to the rice.
Your advice makes sense when your local options are good enough, but I don't think you're actually arguing that quality doesn't matter -- only that beyond a certain point the additional discernment isn't valuable.
For me, I get dissatisfied and then reach for something nicer and nicer until I hit a limit. I'm just very skeptical he'd still love cheap instant coffee. He was climbing a sort of dopamine ladder. Then he ran out of rungs to climb. Now he has to move to a new thing. Life is almost nothing but impermanence and dissatisfaction. Its a little odd to think you could somehow beat the system. The person who finishes the dopamine ladder would never have been happy staying at the most bottom rung, which was disintegrating for them hence pushing them along to the highest rung. Short of becoming a very serious practitioner in things like meditation and other monastic-type things to fight these urges, this is just a really tough thing to get away from.
Now job, new book, new video game, new movie, new friend, etc. We're almost always doing this in some way.
Maybe those examples are things you don't have good discernment with. For me, I can instantly tell when I have quality headphone speakers. I can hear a fuller range of music than cheap ones. Its almost always obvious and cheap ones are almost always annoying. I have yet to go deeper into audiophone territory and I might never, but I have affordable headphones with really nice speakers inside and I wont go any less quality than this. So maybe for you, you can't tell or don't value it, but there are probably other things you do focus on.
Until I was 30-something I thought I just didn't like coffee or chocolate.
Then one day I had actually proper coffee, and I discovered that good coffee isn't just some imperceptably theoretically better version of regular coffee that snobs are basically just faking being sophisticated for show. They are two entirely different things.
Same even more so for chocolate. 99% of chocolate products you come into contact with are garbage. Actual chocolate is like an entirely different product. It's not a better version of the usual thing. I ate it and thought "Oh. Ok THIS must be why chocolate ever became this huge thing in the first place. Hundreds of years ago before all the industrial process and market forces produced all the "chocolate" I ever tasted in my life, what they had was this, actual chocolate. Of course they loved it."
To restate the point, I was never happy with the regular version in the first place. I assumed "I don't like coffee" or chocolate, the same way I don't like cigarettes. Turns out I love them both.
And it's possible to continue to enjoy the results of having discovered and grown some taste in some area indefinitely without diminishing returns or anything like that. I'm not much of a sweets person so I still don't buy a lot of chocolate or chocolate things like cookies etc, but we have a Trade subscription and get a new and different bag from some random indipendant roaster every 2 or 3 weeks and it's great. I don't love every single bag but I at least find them all interesting and I do love the overall high level of quality basically all the time. I'm not now overall poorer for having discovered good coffee. Life is better. And what else is there?
So have you tried Cuban cigars?
A friend and I have bonded over appreciating the "shit" things, like white bread toast and hotel coffee and I think that's quite a good habit to instill. I love coffee and will hunt out the best spots in any city for a single-origin V60 on ice, but I am equally content in a diner when the only option is literally just "coffee".
Also studying art & practicing photography has made the world a much more beautiful place. Some of my best pictures have been taken in places that are usually considered unphotogenic.
To quote Reggie Watts:
Listen, invest two hundred dollars in a pair of good headphones Take care of ′em, put 'em in your ears, listen to the music Listen to how it′s supposed to be recorded You're missing, I swear to God, forty to fifty percent Of the music that's in there in the first place So if you wanna go back and listen to The shit that you thought you liked You might even like it more, motherf*er
This did inspire me to get better headphones and I have no regrets! I think some parts of the aversion to getting too fancy come from the reasonable ideas of: not wanting to lower your floor, avoiding the hedonic treadmill, and not wanting to increase your burn. This kind of does make sense for coffee: a lot of coffees you get will be out of your control and increasing the fanciness of your coffee is an ongoing expense. For headphones though they're all moot. I can't remember the last time I wore someone else's headphones, and it's just a pretty small once off payment (these have lasted me 5 years). I would strongly recommend upgrading in this department.
As for TVs, I rewatched Alien on my friend's new LG OLED and it was absolutely stunning. I am looking forward to getting a new place and having a nice set up like that. Again just a once off thing.
And just for balance, my computer monitor which I use all the time has an annoying flickering issue that I have just been putting up with for a long time.
The point of the video/movie/song etc. is the content not the fidelity, there is a level of fidelity that allows 99 per cent of the enjoyment of the content. That level of fidelity typically costs 20$ for headphones and 200$ for tvs.
1080p and mp3s are good enough. The point is to see what's happening on the screen and to hear without noise.
And true to my predictions, I no longer play tennis and I'm only $15 poorer. I don't know how to put this into words, but the fact that I avoided wasting $150 and only "wasted" $15 into something I knew might be temporary also feels very satisfying.
I know that's supposed to convey restraint, but it seems too much fiddling to me. But I've been using Vim for decades, so I only touch my .vimrc when something breaks.
> I have come to understand that there are two kinds of people, those who do things only if it helps them achieve a goal, and those who do things just because.
And like the author, I agree that taste is acquired through tinkering and trying to be able to discern the qualities of one approach or one design over another. You can't have good taste in anything without having tried lots of variants in that domain -- wine, sushi, furniture, color, style, etc. Having this quality now is more important than ever for senior devs and mid-level devs that want to reach the next level.
When anyone can vibe code, it is the ones with "good taste" in the design of systems that will thrive. Anyone can use an agent and code fast; few will be able to do it fast and well and build systems that do not eventually collapse under the weight of their own tangled mess.
How to acquire it? Have a folder called `sandbox` and just build small projects in there and try new ideas, new techniques, new libraries you come across. Used a particularly interesting package? Go check out the GitHub repo and see how they did it; learn something new. Good taste can be acquired; it just surprises me how few devs actually care to seek it.
As a concrete example I just reviewed a PR for a feature that someone wanted to add to a flask app. It had a ton of terraform code, an aws api gateway, a lambda, etc. then on the flask app frontend they added a page with a call to this new API. I asked why they didn’t just add a route to the flask app. Blank stare response.
Very sad to me because the building and solving puzzles is the fun part.
(For those not familiar https://thedailywtf.com/)
Otherwise you run into the danger of having parts that are peculiar and or obscure to everyone except the one who wrote them. That's if you are lucky, if you are unlucky the person who wrote them won't be able to decode them either.
I wouldn't get caught up in the word "distinctive" to the detriment of losing the larger point about creators being thoughtful and opinionated.
I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability or its productivity, I think to myself "VSCode is also very customizable and there's a lot of ways to get a lot of productivity out of it, why would I use neovim?".
Surely there's something I'm missing? Does it help you stay more in the flow or something? Is it because it's faster? Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine? Please enlighten me!
It's absolutely not for everyone, though it looks like some of the pre-built configs (NvChad, LaZyVim, etc.) are decent enough of the box now that you don't need to go on the endless-customization journey if you don't want to. To me though, that's the appeal: tinkering, tweaking, refining. Generally when people ask if they should use Vim, I tell them probably not but try it for a few weeks and see if it clicks in your brain. I had a great VSCode setup, everything worked great, I was productive, but something about Vim just made more sense to me once I got over the hump of modes and all the keymaps you need to turn into muscle memory.
Edit: I also like that I can do abominations like:
("def" @keyword (#set! conceal "ƒ"))
("if" @keyword (#set! conceal "?"))
("unless" @keyword (#set! conceal "¿"))
("else" @keyword (#set! conceal "∶"))
("elsif" @keyword (#set! conceal "⁇"))
("case" @keyword (#set! conceal "⟨?"))
("when" @keyword (#set! conceal "→"))
("begin" @keyword (#set! conceal "⌊"))
to make Ruby look absolutely insane. Is it useful? No. Do people hate it when I share my screen? Yes.
Neovim worked the same just about everywhere and I could choose my terminal. Especially with tiling, for me it's just feels better.
> I'm a VSCode user and when I hear people talk about neovim and it customizability
> Is it because it's faster?
> Maybe it's because it's an editor you can easily use while ssh'd into a remote machine?
I did convert myself from a minimal vscode setup (disabled everything & only LSP extensions) to LazyVim nvim a few months ago. I had to tweak my .config/nvim, relearn Lua again, and read the manual. It took me about a week to settle things down and get used to basic nvim bindings.
After another week of suffering trying to fix JDTLS (Java LSP) integration, I'm enjoying my nvim setup. Unlike vscode sync which requires you to login, I could just git clone my `.config/nvim` and I'm good to go.
But here's what I learned after a long time trying different things and what's worked.
Don't try to find objective reasons for making big shifts in your workflow - be that a change of your major tool, language, technique, or paradigm. What I mean is: don't try to decide if any concrete tool would be good for you. Instead, try to understand the big underlying idea behind the tool. Once you comprehend the abstraction, choosing a concrete implementation of that idea wouldn't really matter - you can carry the big idea with you regardless of one concrete implementation.
In practice, here's what I mean: the idea of vim-navigation is absolutely beautiful, pragmatic, and fantastic, and it's positively worth every minute of the initial learning curve. It's really not that hard - it only requires just a bit of dedication and discipline. I honestly don't understand programmers who choose to be in this field, yet outright reject the mere idea of it after trying it for like six minutes.
Just go with it - you probably will hate me, everyone else in this thread, and yourself for a few days, but then it will grok. Once you have a good understanding of its tenets, you could easily take it to whichever medium you choose to stay in and it doesn't even have to be neovim.
Neovim might be great for you, and maybe not even as a concrete tool to achieve defined goals, but even as a head-start medium to understand the 'big idea' of vim-navigation.
Finally, whenever picking up a new thing, maybe don't try to find elevator pitches. After the initial acquaintance - Wikipedia, GitHub pages, etc. - google instead: "Why does [that thing] suck..." and maybe try instead to find compelling reasons to remain skeptical. Trying to remain unconvinced may help you find perspectives for why a certain idea is a matter of fact might be a good one to have in your pocket.
but it’s like learning to play the piano, it only feels natural after years of practice
nowadays I’m faster with Cursor so it doesn’t matter as much
Coding for others is not art, it does not have much meaning in of itself. Your users won't marvel at your choice of language or your usage of design patterns - they care about how the end product looks and works.
In a world like that where you have to work in a team, why you ever wear your inflexibility as a badge of pride? The ones who are the most useful are the ones who can code any way, any how, and can plugin anywhere - "taste" be damned. If you want to be a net positive on the teams you work on, stop thinking it's about you, because it's not.
Yeah, but if the patch is unreadable slop, some tasteful choices that make the code more maintainable will make features and bugfixes come faster for users and number go up for the business.
It absolutely is, and I think it's what separates good from bad and junior from senior devs.
Most devs can produce an artifact that more or less works. But one that has an internal consistency others can understand and extend, one which accurately captures the problem as it exists and ways it will likely change, is much more of an art form.
A big part of that is knowing which situations are worth making a stand. Every you write code or leave feedback, your doing it for your team current and future.
I see code more like rocks, nails, planks, tape, shards of broken glass, and a pile of signs that say things like RADIOACTIVE - DO NOT ENTER. If you need to do something cool with that stuff you probably do need to create something that looks pretty interesting and elegant in spite of your choice in building materials. But sometimes you just need to take a NO TRESPASSING sign and tape it to a plank that you jam into a pile of rocks. Don’t need to find a hammer if you don’t use nails, only need it up for a day, just one of a hundred things on your plate to do something of bigger scope and impact - just make sure the rocks are big enough to keep the plank standing, leave and forget about it.
How did you develop your sense of taste in code? Any stories or lessons worth sharing?
So...
> If you don't tinker, you don't have taste
> Acquiring good taste comes through using various things, discarding the ones you don’t like and keeping the ones you do. if you never try various things, you will not acquire good taste.
No. That's not how it works.
I'm tired boss
Lost me here. If tastes don't converge in the limit, then there's no point and you're just justifying a hobby.
1. It can easily devolve into meaningless tweaking (see author's point about touching dotfiles) which can still be satisfying but not very impactful. 2. It's hard to maintain motivation when something stops being fun. This is where external motivators like bosses, clients and scoreboards (e.g. Advent of Code) are actually valuable...
constantcrying•6h ago
I do get satisfaction from the results of my work, not through the mechanical process of arriving there. Tools are useful or not and this is the category by which I decide to use them or not.
supportengineer•6h ago
waynesonfire•5h ago
IncreasePosts•5h ago
30minAdayHN•5h ago
Also usefulness is very subjective too depending on the context and scope.
PantaloonFlames•5h ago
It is not about aesthetics , from my reading. You brought that connotation into the conversation.