“Developers have a curse: Always build something…”
Viet Hung - Full-stack Developer at Biomatters
I didn’t have high school experience like most of my peers. Honestly, there’s no particular reason at all. My entry exam was not good, so my family and I decided to pursue studying for a higher diploma and then study abroad. Hmm… I called this an incident. Most classmates were like my brothers and sisters, much older than me. With the generation gap, their interests and hobbies also differed greatly from teenagers. My middle school friends also went to high school, as usual. Indeed, they also had their own lives. As a result, I felt so lost.
I kinda wished that I had those three years. But looking back, I still had good times studying at FPT ApTech. Getting to know older mates helped me to have more mature perspectives and lots of valuable life experiences. By the way, our school had a curse that the graduation ratio is only 1/3. Only a few students can pursue the profession. At that time, my most memorable mate was a guy called T. He was not very good at programming, but his spirit impressed me a lot. He was always eager to learn and did whatever it took. He messed it up initially, but he finally did it. But now he changed his career path ^^. Still, thanks to T, I have more energy and spirit when doing things I am not good at. For example, I used to suffer from many technical layers regarding the Moon Browser, which I made from scratch. It still applies to my writing hobby. I’ve been looking at chapter one for over a year and still haven’t figured it out, but I won’t give up ^^.
You may be wondering why I don’t take the available external sources, something that people have done perfectly so far. It comes from Developer’s curse: Always build something. And it usually comes to 2 purposes: to sell the product and to not flood the skills. For my side, I want to keep building things as a hobby. If I take external sources and available libraries, I’ll never know why I’m using them and generating the other. For example, for Moon Browser, I just wondered why HTML tags is needed, why it was born, and what kind of technical debt people often “tape over” in the browser, etc., then leaving a beautiful application in production. You know, finding bugs in Google Chrome is effortless.
Due to the above problems, I am a big fan of Rust. I’m sure many of you here love it as much as I do. There’re some common bugs that can be avoided its that solid structure. For example, when accessing a variable with a value of “null”, Java will crash and display a NullPointerException. Well, as a Programmer, I wish it tells me a variable can have a null value when compiling. On the other hand, Rust can do this. The value can be null, and I have to take that into account. Otherwise, I can’t compile. Hence, I have to understand how this code works, as well as how everything fits together. If it can compile, it will run fine on the server. So I think Rust will be an important part of software engineering in the future. Data in the world will grow bigger and bigger. Developers have to figure out how to handle that. Moreover, AI will become more widespread someday. Programming languages must optimize for large amounts of data, with memory safety being the top priority.
Finally, at request, let me tell a funny working story I used to do. Less stupid than deleting the database, but this is also very practical. As you may know, when coders come to the coding mode, they usually sit in a row to ensure the idea goes smoothly. One day, I was in the process of fixing an essential bug. Then I have… a call of nature! In the midst of the hot oil, I decided to hold it back ^^. Oh, what happens from there on is not what you think! I still wrote the code to handle that bug and hastily got up to save the process. By some force, I clicked wrongly to delete all the code I just wrote. Well, after that, I completely forgot how I did it! So I want to say that everything is less critical when we need 🚾.
