Comment by Cthulhu_
1 year ago
I want to believe a lot of these algorithms will "come to you" if you're ever in a similar situation; only later will you learn that they have a name, or there's books written about it, etc.
But a lot is opportunity. Like, I had the opportunity to work on an old PHP backend, 500ms - 1 second response times (thanks in part to it writing everything to a giant XML string which was then parsed and converted to a JSON blob before being sent back over the line). Simply rewriting it in naive / best practices Go changed response times to 10 ms. In hindsight the project was far too big to rewrite on my own and I should have spent six months to a year trying to optimize and refactor it, but, hindsight.
This is my experience, and my favorite way to learn: go in blindly, look things up when you get stuck/run out of ideas. I think it forces a deeper understanding of the topic, and really helps things "stick". I assume it's related to the massive dumps of dopamine that come from the "Eureka!" moments.
I've "invented" all sorts of old patents, all sorts of algorithms, including the PID algorithm. I think it helped form a very practically useful "intuition".
But, I've noticed that some people are passionately against this type of self exploration.
Yes. I invented the Trie data structure when I was 19. It was very exciting finding out it had a name, and it was indeed considered a good fit for my use case.
Thats so funny, I had the exact same experience. And when I was 16 I "invented" csv's because I was too lazy to setup SQL for my discord bot. I like to think I've gotten better at searching for the correct solution to things rather than just jumping in with my best guess.
LLMs are pretty good at providing names and search terms for very vague prompts.
Although that's also often an invitation for hallucinations so you have to be even more careful than usual.
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