Ask HN: Do you have to read a lot as a programmer?

8 points by Onixelen ↗ HN
Not just code, I mean a lot of text in English. Can you rely mostly on videos, if you have a hard time reading, and minimize reading to small amount of text?

11 comments

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Yes, there is a lot of reading involved. Educational sources, bug reports, commit messages, logs, documentation and code itself, these all require reading and are things you have to do multiple times a day.

As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific? I'm a very slow reader myself (can listen to an audiobook faster than I can read the same book) and it's not something that's ever worried me professionally.

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> As far as having a hard time reading, could you be more specific?

I read slow, like you mentioned, and have lack of confidence in my ability to read.

There's some you can learn from videos and other tutorials, but really you need to read books. You need to read books and you need to write a lot of code. Coding teaches you how to be better at coding, but reading books teaches you what your code actually means. Reading is where you learn the terminology you need to know to really understand what's going on in your code. It also helps you to be a better communicator with other programmers. Programmers who don't read books can't communicate to other programmers what their programs do. Being a good communicator is part of being a good programmer. So yes, read books, lots of them.
Yes. Over a career - one will learn lot of frameworks, languages, technologies, tools - before jumping to code - there is sometimes dense documentation to go through. At time this can be daunting as things might be poorly documented (eg mongoose documentation).

A handy trick is to make small diagrams of your readings - it can be as simple as writing a timing diagram of calls while reading documentation. This kinds of expands on what one reads - I found them really useful. Also, first search in google images - eg: you want to understand "angular architecture" - usually first few of images will be very relevant to grasp things in a abstract way. By doing this first you get component names and how they are connected (by seeing the image) then you read documentation - you kind of know what documentation is trying to tell now.

Understanding meaning of words are important if you are non-native speakers. Say there is a word you have never come across eg: convolution neural networks. One needs to know 'convolution' means then 'neural networks' before going any further.

So the key takeaway I feel is how quickly can one abstract new concepts or relate them to what is known or build new models of understanding.

+ add google dictionary extension on chrome - double click any word will tell meaning of it.
As I slowly advance in my career, I have realized I need to write a lot as well. Most of the conversations within my teams are done in text:

* irc chat * slack chat * email * wiki with shared information * issues * specification documents

My greatest achievement past three months was not a piece of code but a 2700 word document describing our new testing process.