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"I wasn't the only one bluffing my way through the tech scene. Everyone was doing it, even the much-sought-after engineering talent. I was struck by how many developers were, like myself, not really programmers, but rather this, that and the other. A great number of tech ninjas were not exactly black belts when it came to the actual onerous work of computer programming. So many of the complex, discrete tasks involved in the creation of a website or an app had been automated that it was no longer necessary to possess knowledge of software mechanics. The coder's work was rarely a craft. The apps ran on an assembly line, built with "open-source", off-the-shelf components. The most important computer commands for the ninja to master were copy and paste..."
While it's true this happens a lot, it isn't very difficult to discern someone who actually understands coding from someone just peeling stuff of stack overflow or whatever. And it isn't even the copy paste bit, plenty of proper programmers are just as guilty of it. The differentiator is that a programmer will understand how all the moving parts are working, why they're working the way they do, and what to do to change them. They can optimize without just running through something like composer. They know what their programs are doing.
This is why I resist an over reliance on external libraries or stuff like composer. I dislike not knowing what everything is doing in my programs.
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@maiyannah This is the primary reason I don't really run a mailserver. I've seen enough copy-paste tutorials, but once I set up SMTP and IMAP, I quickly learned that I did not have the background knowledge of Postfix & Dovecot internals and how they relate to Sendmail's implementation to know _why_ I was entering those config file settings, or what to do when spammers changed their tactics.
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@lnxw48a1 Yeah running an email server is a hug pain and its why Gmail et al are so popular.
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@maiyannah And the problem with the connect-the-libs mentality is that you still need to fix things if something goes wrong. This is why I think one of the most important skills is reading and understanding code, perhaps even more important than actually writing code.