Scientific Coding

Introduction

The how is what you needed most for getting anything done. But in order to connect the dots, you must collectively consider the why. Years of experience often be one of the most gauge when it comes to perceivable effectiveness of devs. However, It's so easy to have 1 years of experience 10 times and call it 10 years experience.

Scientific Coding

It's important to avoid using faith in programming. It always has a cost when all you understand is "it just works". The price is you never grow. Moreover, the memorization over understanding increases the probability of preaching to everyone that it needs to be done that way.

For database, 3-4 years ago it's MongoDB, "we all must use NoSQL because it scales". For frontend, it's React, "we all must use React [insert arguments here]".

In reality, it's all about the why. It's harder to understand why. You must know why before you analytically know what tools should be used to solve the problem.

Why?

Frameworks, Libraries and programming languages , depends on how deep you want to go, have been built upon layers and layers of underlying implementations. The problem is that, while it makes app building easier, it also makes it harder to understand what's going on behind the code. Let's say you started out learning React as your first tool you ever known. While React is a great way to quickly build apps and see instant results. It's important that you also understand core programming concepts. You would never understand why React (in a scientific sense) when you never try vanilla JavaScript, jQuery, other frameworks (Vue, Svelte, Angular, etc.).

Conclusion

Instead of chasing the hype, we should focus on understanding the problems, the tools and the solution. Learning is good but make sure you learn the why.