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Comment by ToJans | Hacker News Reader

As an "infrequent developer", I usually piggyback on others to find best practices, in case I have a bigger project. For the tiny ones it simply doesn't matter.

The advantages of being an "infrequent developer" is that you grow an intuition on how to get started with something completely new (cfr. Taleb's anti-fragile), and that you learn a lot from cross-contamination.

Also, others might refer to frequent/infrequent developers as specialists and generalists.

(Edit: reformulation of some Dunglish sentences)

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I don't think that the "infrequent developers" they are talking about are necessarily generalists.

For example, you may be an expert in Python and need to write a bit of C code for now and then. It makes you a frequent Python dev and an infrequent C dev.

In fact, good generalists should be able to fit the "frequent developer" pattern more closely for any language, at a reduced efficiency of course. "infrequent developers" are more likely to be specialists that are out of their specialty.

I find this issue with Node.js stuff. I can't count the times where I found some software that looks great, would really help development, but then it's based off of Node (which we don't use at all), and it requires 3 build tools (none of which we use) and a pile of dependencies... :(

I think node of all things have no excuses. They're javascript all the way down, why don't they have one command to download, build and deploy everything, including any build tools that come to need? Instead they seem to have a baroque setup

Well maintained packages do have that:

    npm install
    npm run (dev|build|deploy)

Poorly maintained ones don't have these run command set and instead rely on pages upon pages of crap in README.md or do have a subset hacked together from whatever the dev needed for their FUD-driven development workflow.

Edit: as an afterthought: maybe the infrequent developers are to blame for not reading about what npm provides?

Edit2: another, I guess inexperienced, developer type I've seen in the wild is "I did some jQuery 5y ago, React probably is as easy to pick up and spaghetti out". For these: stick to what you know and don't play the hype game.

I doubt any of that is specific to infrequent developers.

I agree. I think this is good advice in general.

I suggest one looks at the standard library and ask for people's opinion on well written libraries to pick the style, idioms, limitations and tricks of a language (and even compiler at points depending on what you do -- representations of built-in data structures are enlightening in general).

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