> Occasionally an awareness may filter through that the kind of difficult problems they solve, are the dull trivialities of some other programmer’s daily bread
Radar is one of the magic voodoo technologies that is hard, if not sometimes impossible, to get right. In theory it's extrmeley simple. Anyone with any background in radio knows just how "easy" radar is. You throw a 70cm or shorter wave at something and wait for it to get back. You can also stance two 70cm transmiters (one in front of the other) at diffetent fequencies and using the known distance of the 2 transmitters, the known speed of the wave in the air, and the time of arival of the two waves very simply calculate the speed, distance, and direction of an object. Look up "Doppler Frequency Shift" equations and also just wave velocity. It's dead simple.
Now, given that information I can also talk about how amazingly difficult radar is to implement. All sorts of noise in collection and extremely small errors in sampling can throw your reading far off (in most states in the US that's why there is a +-10MPH speed gratice applied to radar guns).
If someone was to go through and by themselves solve every little problem associated with radar and build a microwave-based radar system I'd be really fucking impressed [0].
This is because radar is hard and the act of tackling every little challenge associated with building it. Just because other people have built radar systems and some people do so every day doesn't mean it isn't hard or you're not advanced for doing so.
Radar is a bit of an extreme example but I think the methodology still applies to making massivly parallelized programs, or synchonization and elimination of race conditions, or learning all of the tricks to get your program into a small space, or even perfecting UX/UI for your users. It doesn't matter if other people have solved it, if you're also solving it on your own then you're just as smart as the others before you who came up with the idea and did it themselves as well.
I do think it's valid to say many programmers are big headed but I think that's just the online space of programmers. Most programmers I've met in real life are really nice and humble people who are just excited to get-shit-done.
> If someone was to go through and by themselves solve every little problem associated with radar and build a microwave-based radar system I'd be really fucking impressed.
Radar is one of the magic voodoo technologies that is hard, if not sometimes impossible, to get right. In theory it's extrmeley simple. Anyone with any background in radio knows just how "easy" radar is. You throw a 70cm or shorter wave at something and wait for it to get back. You can also stance two 70cm transmiters (one in front of the other) at diffetent fequencies and using the known distance of the 2 transmitters, the known speed of the wave in the air, and the time of arival of the two waves very simply calculate the speed, distance, and direction of an object. Look up "Doppler Frequency Shift" equations and also just wave velocity. It's dead simple.
Now, given that information I can also talk about how amazingly difficult radar is to implement. All sorts of noise in collection and extremely small errors in sampling can throw your reading far off (in most states in the US that's why there is a +-10MPH speed gratice applied to radar guns).
If someone was to go through and by themselves solve every little problem associated with radar and build a microwave-based radar system I'd be really fucking impressed [0].
This is because radar is hard and the act of tackling every little challenge associated with building it. Just because other people have built radar systems and some people do so every day doesn't mean it isn't hard or you're not advanced for doing so.
Radar is a bit of an extreme example but I think the methodology still applies to making massivly parallelized programs, or synchonization and elimination of race conditions, or learning all of the tricks to get your program into a small space, or even perfecting UX/UI for your users. It doesn't matter if other people have solved it, if you're also solving it on your own then you're just as smart as the others before you who came up with the idea and did it themselves as well.
I do think it's valid to say many programmers are big headed but I think that's just the online space of programmers. Most programmers I've met in real life are really nice and humble people who are just excited to get-shit-done.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dhp21FxttWM